“I write to find out what I think about something.”

People think kids have no fear of time, no sense of the past, because they’re kids. Wrong.

Funny thing to worry about. Little hairs. Hairs on back of sweater as she goes out of the room. Little hairs, how you look from the back, girls worry about this. Or they used to. Now girls are free. Okay to be unpretty, ungirls.

what shape should I file my nails I wonder / follow shape of moon usually best / once I did them square

 

It was the sound of her writing that woke me. Since you ask, this
is what I remember. Her desk is just outside my room. Some days

I was born in the circus. I play the flat man.
   My voice is flat, my walk is flat, my ironies
         move flatly out to sock you in the eye.

Your glassy wind breaks on a shoutless shore and stirs around
                                                                                                             the rose.

Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece by
                                                                                                       Beckett.
   You know that sense of sinking through crust,

Anne Carson’s poem “The Day Antonioni Came to the Asylum (Rhapsody)” appeared in our Fall 2004 issue. Carson was born sixty-six years ago this week, on June 21. It was a restless moment. He came closer.  
                              …