Funeral of My Character

(paintings by Hikari Shimoda)

What is lost is lost for good reason. Things turn bizarre when the canvas of my feelings is
better off in front of the MacBook at home.

Night may tell why every day is bigger and more worth knowing.

Morning may find me rereading the quote on the tea mug.

Afternoon may pose questions like whether I need to put on a bra and wash my face for the babysitter

while twilight sees me as Yoko Ono, superior, isolate, intrusive and revered.

Similarly, months pass. A bodybuilder can never be mistaken for anything but a
bodybuilder. But a sensitive type is, in June, sufficiently unmedicated and high on the
(gosh) golden light.

In February I see the first wildflower peep from under the snow. It waves to me on its
stem.

When summer is done, I watch the stem crack, bend over, get brown and stiff. But that’s
all right. Because I know the seed will live under the snow.

Similarly, at the funeral of my character, I undergo an (ouch) translation. My character is
built up and scraped away like acrylic on a canvas.

My character tells me: A moral or an ending is a lie; but a story that can’t end is
incomplete

and is waiting for someone to finish it, in the simplest manner possible.

 
Kathleen Ossip

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Cold War, which was named one of Publishers Weekly's 100 best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, the Washington Post, The Believer, Fence, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School. She was a co-founder of LIT, and she's the poetry editor of Women's Studies Quarterly. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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