Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

Loss: An Atlas  
Ron Mohring

with passages from Adrienne Rich’s “XIII: Dedications”

A building faded to quiet speaks nonetheless:
old beams creak, plumbing moans, radiators
tick off grievances like faint flakes driven against
windows—a nearly imperceptible seethe.  Let

it go, let it be.  This hotel knows you, knows
your bedclothes lie in stagnant coils not because
of ardor—you’ve done your best to become
what was asked, knowing love loses momentum.

Even yours.  Even now.  A trickery of evening light:
that moment when it swells like a tear
unwilled, uncontainable, triggers
a new kind of love for the world, for what might

provide subsistence from here on.  As if
we chose what to feed the soul.  As if eyes met
and unmeeting were the same.  But it
passes—a pink bloom proffered then whisked

away as if never there, and through your
failing sight, through your body’s grievances
which have become everyday insults, a chorus
of hurt so constant it seems a murmur,

you can’t help but acknowledge the spirit’s
resilience.  This dogged will, this forward
totter, this—say it—hope to reignite
a passion for anything, even the alphabet . . .

To admit that you too are thirsty ought not
provoke such shame.  Ask the walls, ask
the mantle of quiet surrounding you, the quick
chill riding the night into this city.  Admit that

love, which is not in your language and never
was, never will be, is not what’s at stake.  Erase
the self and bend once again to the task.  Every
desire is pure hunger, nothing else.  It will pass.

Ron Mohring’s poetry collection, Survivable World, won the 2003 Washington Prize. He lives in central Pennsylvania, where he manages Seven Kitchens Press.