Poetry | July 01, 2011
Poetry Feature: George Looney
George Looney
Winner of the 2010 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Poetry
- To Account for Such Grace (featured as Poem of the Week, April 21, 2011)
- Early Pastoral
- The Consolation of a Company of Acrobats
- A Temporary Delaying of the Inevitable
To Account for Such Grace
Some nights, light’s particle nature is italicized
by the downward emphasis of a steady rain.
History is the distance between what happened
and what we say happened. A woman without
an umbrella is a frail shadow hunched over
a small flame flickering between her palms
in a shallow alcove, the only light the flame
cupped in her hands and a sixty-watt bulb
somewhere behind her in the niche she’s found
that almost keeps her out of the frenzied rain.
If this were being painted in sixteenth-century Florence,
the woman would be a statue of the only woman
the church could love, the mother of God
the son, and cupped in her delicate, trembling hands
would be the burning heart of God become man,
having flown out of his dying chest with a last wheeze
from the cross. Rain, in the painting, would be
an occasion for the artist to show off his brilliance
with reflective surfaces, nothing more. History
might ask us to ignore the woman’s hands, the calluses,
how they tremble and seem too delicate to hold up
under her grief. No matter is as delicate
as light. Or as alluring as the face of this woman,
having a smoke, waiting out the rain. Entire histories
have been imagined to account for such grace.
Music has transformed the human voice
to make possible even a vague hint of the delicacy
of this woman’s fragrant hands, moist with mist,
reflecting light in ways a Renaissance master
would have bowed down to, envious, rapt.
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