The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.

I eat. I run. I love running.

Me

I was shrieky and coy. Like one of those girls – the shrieky, coy kind of girl.

Lmao

(I never tell my mother anything. I am not that stupid.)

I look up ‘love at first sight’ in the movies but apart from The Little Mermaid, it only happens to guys.

If I believed all this was working, would it work?

Love is a tide, it is mist Becoming cloud, it is rain On the river, water into water Heart into heart. It is all Downhill from here.

I am a broken-hearted woman, trapped in a body that finds everything hilarious. It feels a bit like vomiting.

This is a very scary place which tells me that the first words out of every angel’s mouth are, Do not be afraid. Every angel that ever appeared. Fear not, fear not.

The masochist is always in control.

How would you feel, if you drew the biggest dick in the world and no one was there to see?

All poems, Phil says, are of love unrequited. I am not sure there is any other kind of poem. And you know, I am not sure there is any other kind of love.

And when she’s gone, there is none like her.

The world has turned into the place where people get hurt, where the man I love will one day die.

time is a mechanism to measure how long we are apart.

Every night we roll down bamboo shutters against the forest and he does not enter my dreams or leave them, because we dream together. My body knows he is there. When we wake, we want the same thing. Each other. Each other.

We make the future word by word, and line by line, and brick by small brick.

One sunny Sunday in my mother’s garden, the bird looked at me and I saw the bird and I wanted to undo language and let him be. The bird just was. Long before any of us were here, and long after we are gone, he did and will exist.