Brian Clements - Forgiven in Providence

Forgiven in Providence

“Keep reading,” she said. “Your voice pleases the violets and that story is full of vertebrate colors, which makes the ficus think of what it could have been.”

Just to see the chestnut of her mouth keep leaping from her lungs like that, I kept reading.

“Read another story,” she said. “Read one with little pieces of vignettes fallen from dogma, which is supposed to uncork something unexpected, like a life.”

“In April,” I began, “the ceremony begins with yellow if you live far enough south...”

She sighed. “Oh, that one... You know, I paid to see a fight, and, by God, I’m going to see a fight. What you’ve become is a crude excuse for license.”

And on it went like a marriage.



Forgiven in Providence, Part II

Each day it all sounds more and more like vaudeville. Dancing with the chickens, serenading the dining room table, role-playing scenarios where I am the bean and the computer is the giant.

But none of that compares to the mystery of doubt when you have the bad taste to live in a lover’s house. She takes the silence of the masses as an unalloyed chime from the bell tower.

Since we are stumbling toward a seed anyway, and since the title already forgave us, why not start an emergency? But if you point at a woman you attack her, because fingers are the devil, and because beneath all theory a plot is crying for mercy.



Forgiven in Providence, Part III

 "Why don’t you cut up your anatomy,” she asked, “and reassemble it as a twisted zombie composer?”

 And if she’d been kidding I might have considered it.

 Once, the purpose of prayer was to guess. Then it was just tradition.



Forgiven in Providence, Part IV

I wanted to tell her a story, so I started in on the one about the chestnut of her mouth.

“Make like hydrogen,” she said. “Split.”

“But it’s changed,” I promised. “Now it’s all about how—after democracy didn’t free us, and the vaccine didn’t save us, and the garbage man turned out to be just a work around—we bought a new car.”

“I want to hear,” she pined, “about my noble childhood, and the religious fervor of bees. About the practice of the glider pilot and his fear.”

“A sonata is the window,” she continued, “the wind. You are just a guess. The lines the lake makes in its going away is not too normal an emotion. Tell me something wrong, something insignificant, like a poem...”

And I guess we’d had about enough talking at the point.  There are too many things about people that can’t be prevented by sheepskin. Unfortunately, that’s when I started singing.


[from Slope]