Knopf Doubleday, Belletristik, Red Doc (Englisch, Anne Carson, 2014)

TIME PASSES TIME does not pass. Time all but passes. Time usually passes. Time passing and gazing. Time has no gaze. Time as perseverance. Time as hunger. Time in a natural way. Time when you were six the day a mountain. Mountain time. Time I don&rsquo t remember. Time for a dog in an alley caught in the beam of your flashlight. Time not a video. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time smeared under the eyes of the miners as they rattle down into the mine. Time if you are bankrupt. Time if you are Prometheus. Time if you are all the little tubes on the roots of a gorse plant sucking greenish black moistures up into new scribbled continents. Time it takes for the postal clerk to apply her lipstick at the back of the post office before the supervisor returns. Time it takes for a cow to tip over. Time in jail. Time as overcoats in a closet. Time for a herd of turkeys skidding and surprised on ice. All the time that has soaked into the walls here. Time between the little clicks. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of the stars. Time for the man at the bus stop standing on one leg to tie his shoe. Time taking Night by the hand and trotting off down the road. Time passes oh boy. Time got the jump on me yes it did. -- SHUFFLING RECIPES COUPONS horoscopes in a kitchen drawer he turns up an old B& W photograph of her posed in dashing swim costume on some long ago back porch. One leg forward like a Greek kouros a cigarette in the other hand she glows as a drop of water glows in sun. She looks sexually astute in a way that terrifies him he puts this aside and all at once the grainy photograph the early marvel of her life flung up at him a thing hardly believable! knocks him to his knees. He grips his arms and weeps. Pain catches the whole insides of him and wrings it. Oddly now remembering his grandmother&rsquo s wringer washer silvergreen and upright on a platform of wet boards in her back kitchen beside the washing tubs. How carefully he&rsquo d been taught to feed a piece of dripping cloth between the two big lips of the rollers while she cranked the handle and the cloth grabbed fforward to emerge on the other side as a weird compressed pane of itself. He hadn&rsquo t known his grandmother long or well. She smelled of Noxzema. Didn&rsquo t like doctors. Believed in herbs and the Bible. When the apostles walked down the street she said their shadows would heal people. His mother once told him a story about her dying. They never liked each other hadn&rsquo t visited for years but someone arranged a phone call. So there they were mother and daughter on the telephone separate cities separate nights both suffering from asthma and so moved they couldn&rsquo t speak. I heard her breathing I knew what it was his mother said. He looks up. He&rsquo d almost forgot about the rain. Unloading on the roof and squandering down the gutters. Rain continuous since the funeral a wrecking rattling bewildering Lethe- knuckling mob of rain. A rain with no instructions. -- WIFE OF BRAIN Mothers in summer Mothers in winter Mothers in autumn Mothers in spring Mothers at altitude Mothers in solitude Mothers as platitude Mothers in spring Mothers banking their shots Mothers grackling their throats Mothers dumped from their boats In spring Mothers as ice Or when they are nice No one more nice In spring Mothers ashamed and Ablaze and clear At the end As they are As they almost all are, and then Mothers don&rsquo t come around Again In spring.