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Excerpt from
Horses were turned loose in the child’s sorrow. Black and roan, cantering through snow.
The way light fills the hand with light, november with graves, infancy with white.
White. Given lilacs, lilacs disappear. Then low voices rising in walls.
The way they withdrew from the child’s body and spoke as if it were not there.
What ghost comes to the bedside whispering You?
--With its no one without its I--
A dwarf ghost? A closet of empty clothes?
Ours was a ghost who stole household goods. Nothing anyone would miss.
Supper plates. Apples. Barbed wire behind the house. What?
Carolyn Forche at Modern American Poetry
Marist Digital Library: Carolyn Forche links
From an interview with Carolyn Forché
by David Wright
The sacred can appear in language. It does appear in language and it appears in poetry. But poetry’s not useful to the sacred. I mean one doesn’t submit poetry to a kind of usefulness. It doesn’t have utility in that way.
The sacred is resonant in the language but this has nothing to do with literature as it’s socially constructed and perceived as a body of human labor, as a product of socially constructed genius or anything else. I don’t fetishize literature. Maybe that’s better than sacralize.
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