WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.580 align:middle line:90% 00:00:07.580 --> 00:00:08.080 align:middle line:90% "Grief." 00:00:08.080 --> 00:00:11.410 align:middle line:90% 00:00:11.410 --> 00:00:15.430 align:middle line:84% "Grief walks miles beside the polluted river. 00:00:15.430 --> 00:00:19.540 align:middle line:84% Grief counts days sucked into the winter solstice. 00:00:19.540 --> 00:00:22.600 align:middle line:84% Grief receives exuberant schoolyard voices 00:00:22.600 --> 00:00:26.210 align:middle line:90% as flung despisals. 00:00:26.210 --> 00:00:29.480 align:middle line:84% It will always be the 1st of September. 00:00:29.480 --> 00:00:32.420 align:middle line:84% There will be Dominican boys, whose soccer game 00:00:32.420 --> 00:00:35.930 align:middle line:84% provides an innocent conversation for the two people 00:00:35.930 --> 00:00:38.480 align:middle line:90% drinking coffee, coatless. 00:00:38.480 --> 00:00:42.740 align:middle line:84% There will be sunset rose light on the river like a cathedral. 00:00:42.740 --> 00:00:45.290 align:middle line:84% There will be a rusty, amusing tugboat, 00:00:45.290 --> 00:00:48.600 align:middle line:90% pushing the barge home. 00:00:48.600 --> 00:00:52.140 align:middle line:84% Did she think she knew what her friend intended? 00:00:52.140 --> 00:00:55.230 align:middle line:84% Did she think her brother rejoiced to see her? 00:00:55.230 --> 00:00:57.900 align:middle line:84% Did she think she'd sleep one more time 00:00:57.900 --> 00:01:02.070 align:middle line:90% till sunrise holding her lover? 00:01:02.070 --> 00:01:05.370 align:middle line:84% Grief has got no brother, sister, or lover. 00:01:05.370 --> 00:01:08.070 align:middle line:84% Grief finds friendship elsewhere. 00:01:08.070 --> 00:01:10.410 align:middle line:84% Grief, in the darkened hours and hours 00:01:10.410 --> 00:01:16.740 align:middle line:84% before light flicks in one window, holds grief, a mirror. 00:01:16.740 --> 00:01:20.700 align:middle line:84% Brother, he was dead in a war-drained city. 00:01:20.700 --> 00:01:23.430 align:middle line:84% Grief was shelling peas with cold water, 00:01:23.430 --> 00:01:24.660 align:middle line:90% running in the sink. 00:01:24.660 --> 00:01:29.820 align:middle line:84% A harpsichord trilled Corelli until the phone rang. 00:01:29.820 --> 00:01:33.690 align:middle line:84% And when grief came home from a post-op nightwatch, 00:01:33.690 --> 00:01:37.500 align:middle line:84% two small girls looked reticent over homework. 00:01:37.500 --> 00:01:40.620 align:middle line:84% Half the closet, half the drawers were empty. 00:01:40.620 --> 00:01:43.890 align:middle line:90% Who was gone this time? 00:01:43.890 --> 00:01:46.410 align:middle line:84% Grief is isolationist, short-viewed. 00:01:46.410 --> 00:01:49.380 align:middle line:84% Grief lacks empathy, compassion, imagination, 00:01:49.380 --> 00:01:52.410 align:middle line:84% reads accounts of massacres, floods, and earthquakes 00:01:52.410 --> 00:01:55.890 align:middle line:90% mired in one story. 00:01:55.890 --> 00:01:59.580 align:middle line:84% Grief is individual, bourgeois, common, and banal, 00:01:59.580 --> 00:02:02.480 align:middle line:84% two women's exchange in Sunday market: 00:02:02.480 --> 00:02:04.710 align:middle line:90% "Le mari de Germaine est mort." 00:02:04.710 --> 00:02:08.380 align:middle line:90% They fill bags with apples. 00:02:08.380 --> 00:02:11.290 align:middle line:84% Grief is primagravida in her fifth month. 00:02:11.290 --> 00:02:14.410 align:middle line:84% Now, she knows the fetus has died inside her. 00:02:14.410 --> 00:02:18.430 align:middle line:84% Now, she crosses shopping streets on a sun-shot midwinter 00:02:18.430 --> 00:02:20.770 align:middle line:90% morning. 00:02:20.770 --> 00:02:24.610 align:middle line:84% Winter licks the marrow from streets that open on to parks, 00:02:24.610 --> 00:02:28.360 align:middle line:84% and boulevards, rivers, river-parallel parkways, 00:02:28.360 --> 00:02:33.040 align:middle line:84% arteries to bridges, interstates, airports. 00:02:33.040 --> 00:02:36.610 align:middle line:84% Grief daubs kohl on middle-aged, burning eyelids. 00:02:36.610 --> 00:02:40.660 align:middle line:84% Grief drives miles not noticing if a highway runs 00:02:40.660 --> 00:02:44.170 align:middle line:84% beside an ocean, abandoned buildings, or blackened wheat 00:02:44.170 --> 00:02:48.190 align:middle line:84% fields, and in fact, she's indoors. 00:02:48.190 --> 00:02:51.220 align:middle line:84% Although her height is average, massive furniture 00:02:51.220 --> 00:02:52.780 align:middle line:90% blocks and crowds her. 00:02:52.780 --> 00:02:56.350 align:middle line:84% Oak and pine, warm gold in their grain she thought 00:02:56.350 --> 00:03:00.110 align:middle line:90% would ransom her season. 00:03:00.110 --> 00:03:03.440 align:middle line:84% Workmen clear a path to repair the windows, 00:03:03.440 --> 00:03:05.720 align:middle line:84% not with panes of light on their backs, 00:03:05.720 --> 00:03:07.760 align:middle line:90% no message bearers these. 00:03:07.760 --> 00:03:13.500 align:middle line:84% Still stubbornly green, a street leads back to the river. 00:03:13.500 --> 00:03:16.470 align:middle line:84% 14 years drained into the 15 minutes 00:03:16.470 --> 00:03:19.140 align:middle line:84% that it took a late summer sun to douse 00:03:19.140 --> 00:03:22.110 align:middle line:84% its light behind the opposite bank, the boys 00:03:22.110 --> 00:03:25.160 align:middle line:90% to call their match over."