VQR’s connection to the inaugural poem. It’s complicated.
Heavenly earth flutters in the mind, word-borne.
Here it does not rest, a past I summoned with a bell so that things awaken
This is the age of ashes. Ashes of burned children, of cold trials of hell,
Aging women mourn while they go to market, buy fish, figs, tomatoes, enough today to feed the wolf asleep underneath the table who wakes from what dream?
This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft
before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics
and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before thorazine,
which the suicide O’Laughlin called “handcuffs for the mind.”
What if it were not such a tragedy to outlive one’s nation,
