After decades of being unable to do so, she found herself again able to believe the end of this body is not the end of its life. She was at rest in a future in which the ones she loved would certainly die, yet now her eyes seemed to curve sight around the dark forest to the meadow, its yield without measure or want for measure. It was like the times her voice had nothing to say, yet she believed the imagination, slowly or quickly, would fill this gap because it had made a promise, how the symphony hall is infused with music even when no one is there, since its purpose evokes the music of music’s absence. This analogy gave her pleasure, which she took as relief. But then someone she loved was pulled, however slowly, toward the forest. And she realized that although belief might assuage fear, it would not temper sadness, nor the bright fear of sadness, which, at this pitch, rendered the discussion of the empty music hall truly empty.
Katie Ford is the author of four books of poems: Deposition; Colosseum; Blood Lyrics; and If You Have to Go, all published by Graywolf Press. Blood Lyrics was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. International invitations to read and lecture include festivals in Tunis, Morocco, Oslo, and Stockholm. She completed graduate work in world religions, theology and poetry at Harvard University, and, following that, received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and the Norton Introduction to Literature. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside where she is a Professor of Creative Writing. Please visit www.fordkatie.com for more information.