cold spring seascape with rubble and stutter.

this might say it better if you knew what it was i want to say. 

want to say. that's it. it's about what you want to say, and if you're lucky what you want and need are the same. or nearly. 

i wanted to finish what you heard is true, and did, quickly for me, three days was enough, and i had the gist of it. it was horrific and read like a dream. it was a late recounting. with passages untouched from the past. all past, yet recounted to lay to rest in one place, all fragments together now, one hopes. i still don't understand the writer carolyn forché. i understand what she writes but i don't understand the person. she wrote something, and repeated it about her son, decades after the events in the book, i can't find it now, but something about his lego toys scattered on the floor she kept stepping on and gathering up. he called them persons. it made me think of the dismembered bodies she wrote about. i think maybe the book is for her son, to show what her life was like before him, and to show the way the world was and still is. expiation. atonement. she was a witness for resistance, but also american, complicit, though powerless, except in recording. we know by now that war in one place may start in another, especially as regards america, and that war will not end, that america means war, whether it is called by the name of the country under siege or the american war, america means war.  that is what i think she was called to atone for, feeling her young son would carry her conscience, and the need to atone too.
when i say i don't feel like i know her still, i think it's part of witness, it's a role, putting oneself in it in order to fulfill the work. but she's also a poet, and has the need the need to express the particulars of herself in the world through art. i'm not sure, i haven't read enough of her poems perhaps, but what i read there also seemed to be fulfilling the role of witness, and now i want to check the poems again, to see how they relate to the memoir. i think about what she would write if there were no war to witness. what would she write now that the memoir is packed away in this book for her son, and others in the struggle of life, for opening. will it be an opening?