Elizabeth Smart

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Chloe

How can I pity him even though he lies so vulnerable up there in the stinging winds, when every hole that bleeds me was made by a kiss of his? He is beautiful as allegory. He is beautiful as the legend the imagination washes up on the sand. 

Why does he write 'minor martyrdoms? Didn't the crucifixion only last three days? Is it the shortness of the days of torture or the fact that hope still breathes that lets him say minor? How can anything so total not be major? 

He has martyred me, but for no cause, nor has he any idea of the size and consequence of my wounds. Perhaps he will never know, for to say, You killed me daily and O most especially nightly, would imply blame. I do not blame, nor even say, You might have done this or this rather than that. 

I even say, You must do that, you have to do it, there is no alternative, urging my own murder. 

Wherever we went, though, whatever we did, we had always to return like cornered foxes to the hotel room. And always the wallpaper dispersed with its heavy writing any optimism we might have gathered. There were no solutions in the writing on the wall. It urged us to despair. It is criminally responsible for all histories. 

For who plans suicide sitting in the sun? It is the pile of dust under the bed, the dirty sheets that were never washed, that precipitate fatal action. 

It has happened, the miracle has arrived, everything begins today, everything you touch is born; the new moon attended by two enormous stars; the sunny day fading with a glow to exhilaration; all the paraphernalia of existence, all my sad companions of these last twenty years, the pots and pans in Mrs Wurtle’s kitchen, ribbons of streets, wilted geraniums, thin children’s legs, all the world solicits me with joy, leaps at me electrically, claiming its birth at last. 

To deny love, and deceive it meanly by pretending that what is unconsummated remains eternal, or that love sublimated reaches highest to heavenly love, is repulsive, as the hypocrite’s face is repulsive when placed too near the truth. Farther off from the centre of the world, of all worlds, I might be better fooled, but can I see the light of a match while burning in the arms of the sun? 

The tremendous gentleness of that moment smothers me under; all through the night it is centaurs hoofed and galloping over my heart: the poison has got into my blood. I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done. 

When his soft shadow, which yet in the night comes barbed with all the weapons of guilt, is cast up hugely on the pane, I watch it as from a loge in the theatre, the continually vibrating I in the darkness. Swearing invulnerability, I measure mercilessly his shortcomings, and with luxurious scorn, ask who could be ensnared there.

But that huge shadow is more than my only moon, more even than my destruction: it has the innocent slipping advent of the next generation, which enters in one night of joy, and leaves a meadowful of lamenting milkmaids when its purpose is grown to fruit.  

And, for a moment, at that gaze, I am happy to forego my future, and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

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