HEARTH
or
YOU DON'T NEED A CHIMNEY IN GEORGIA
Without sin, I’d have no one to love--no one
around whom to organize my love
as furniture gathers itself around a television.
Love: the semi-circular arrangement of love-like
feelings around an object designated for love.
No sin means no locus for passion. No crux.
Sinnerless--I’d have no center in which I might be
entertained, no soft place to sit and, like a gun, focus
all of my terrible energy. No site on which to
rivet my love like love was eyes or fasten it all
buttony—round and remote but intent
upon the docudrama of the sinner's life
—which is sin, which I hate.
Kirsten Kaschock's first book of poetry, Unfathoms, is available from Slope Editions. A Beautiful Name for a Girl is upcoming from Ahsahta Press in January. Her first novel, Sleight, is scheduled to be published by Coffee House Press in 2011. She is currently a PhD fellow in dance at Temple University. Kirsten will be making merry with her three sons and their father and partaking in both much egg nog and joy.
I have someone to love without sin, I suppose. Biology confounds theology yet again. But we *have* a chimney in Georgia and have not yet cleared it out for use. The prevaricating weather wants our chimney's smokey thrusts.
ReplyDeleteBut why must one love absorb all rivets? Unless that one must.
want = to desire, to lack... and if I lack desire or desire lack, what then?
ReplyDelete