False Starts From Circadia

This short piece on was commissioned by Kildare Library & Arts Services.

Image: an envelope poem by Emily Dickinson

Excerpt:

LATTICE 

Or else, I thought, I can write about cabin fever—isolation. 

I can write about why it’s harder for some people than others to be told there are things they cannot do and places they cannot go. 

I can write about why some people are calling their home ‘a prison’, though a prison is a place you are sent and not a place you have ever, at any time, chosen to go.  

But all that came out was; the Latin root for incarceration means ‘of a lattice or grid’.

And sure enough, the patterns of enclosure—the activities that emerge when we find ourselves entrapped or in some other way immured—are often lattice-like; overlapping and repetitive. 

To keep her aggressive suitors at bay, Penelope weaves a shroud and every night unravels the progress she’s made. 

Jean Genet begins his first novel inside his cell at Prison de la Santé and the guards take the paper he has written on away, so he begins the book again. 

Robert Walser writes his microscripts on business cards inside a Swiss sanitorium, the inked letters shrunken down ‘til they become impenetrable code. 

Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems—lines written in pencil on the underside of a careful fold. 

The  unseen track your feet have made at the end of another day spent moving around your home.