Reading The Hours of Catherine of Cleves / I Believe in You
by Susan Miller
Susan L. Miller teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter. openroses@hotmail.com
On the A train, going downtown, the lights
flicker and dim, and the car wobbles
back and forth, shuttling at the speed of nausea.
In my seat, I bend with my elbows on my knees
and pray, though I don’t know what I am praying for:
an end to the soot, the cold, the indignity
of slush crushed into dirty ice at the curb,
an end to illness rising like a cough
to shadow the kindness of my every word,
an end. I’ve been keeping Neil Young
on the Walkman, listening to his lament:
Now that you’ve made yourself love me, do you
think I can change it in a day? How can I
place you above me? And I wonder daily,
though John Donne and St. John and Gerard
and Therese believed, how can I know
what they thought was true is true?
It was so long ago. . .
And then I slide the Book of Hours from its blue
slipcover, the box built to keep it new,
and I open to a page where someone drew
(five hundred years ago) a dozen mussels, tiny, precise,
their dark lips ridged at the edge of their soft flesh,
just as they are in my dinner-bowl
when I steam them and eat them now.
Susan L. Miller teaches Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter. openroses@hotmail.com
On the A train, going downtown, the lights
flicker and dim, and the car wobbles
back and forth, shuttling at the speed of nausea.
In my seat, I bend with my elbows on my knees
and pray, though I don’t know what I am praying for:
an end to the soot, the cold, the indignity
of slush crushed into dirty ice at the curb,
an end to illness rising like a cough
to shadow the kindness of my every word,
an end. I’ve been keeping Neil Young
on the Walkman, listening to his lament:
Now that you’ve made yourself love me, do you
think I can change it in a day? How can I
place you above me? And I wonder daily,
though John Donne and St. John and Gerard
and Therese believed, how can I know
what they thought was true is true?
It was so long ago. . .
And then I slide the Book of Hours from its blue
slipcover, the box built to keep it new,
and I open to a page where someone drew
(five hundred years ago) a dozen mussels, tiny, precise,
their dark lips ridged at the edge of their soft flesh,
just as they are in my dinner-bowl
when I steam them and eat them now.
