Elegiac Stasis

Mary Jo Bang in Elegy has a poem entitled "Evidence" which carries over to a second page and ends

How changed we are.
Otherwise no longer exists.
There is only stasis, continually
Granting ceremony to the moment.

And these lines stand alone on the page with nothing but white space until page end. They speak to the grief that is the subject of this collection and is a constant companion to the poet narrator. Another poem ends

A dream bell begins to toll, to tell
Of the intolerable end that keeps going on.

The very simplicity of the assonance "toll", "tell", "intolerable" rings out the anguish of pain that is perpetual. And yet it is from such sorrow that ceremony is fashioned much like the words fashion themselves into an honouring.

And so for day 1098
15.12.2009