Oxford
// Claire Hurley
Visiting my sister was supposed to be
edification.
Willing to drop it all, I would fly the ocean over,
and nothing to be but small.
But visiting my sister is talking; translation.
Here I would glimpse at something
through a slit in the wall — imagined
histories, futures only as slightly
bettered versions of the present, but why.
Visiting my sister is glossolalia;
is moments; joyful music;
is evenings of lush orations in the living room
where someone’s quiet voice is trembling, moved simply
by its own movement; a dead man’s billowing prose;
is evenings of searching through endless
volumes of poetry, uselessly, tired eyes
and mind unwilling to settle on something good.
Maybe I had imagined something good and,
unwilling to settle, let it die.
Left it behind before it could be born, but why.
Aptly so, visiting my sister is to speak of this
behind the back. To depart and to return, again, always,
to philosophise on these and other amalgamated things.
Presence, and physicality made manifest.
The difference between.
The minutiae of other people’s pain, far away,
seeping somehow still it won’t stop;
visiting my sister is not knowing how to stop.
It is brief, too brief, but drawn out too,
as are we; and so I laugh
and she prays; and so we
begin again.