Loneliness was the most specific condition she found herself communing with; it came with force, actualizing her contours as she moved from bed to stove, porch to floor, floor to bath to closet to bed, where she lay unseen in a condition part mystery, part roadside trench. No one knew how she moved through the quiet apartment, rarely touching the piano, and if she did, it was always the same relentless piece by Satie, which she could play without error for only ten measures. The music seemed fated to fall apart, she told herself, and all she tried and failed to see out in a given day—reading, laundry, writing—only thickened the lonely line drawn around her by an accurate hand. Sometimes, and rarely, she was compelled by a constellation of feelings, sightings, and urgings to try to write just once more. So caught, the writing drew back the iron filings that no where else on earth could coalesce. That’s when the loneliness calmed. She could go to bed now, sleeping a sleep unfraught by reach. Nothing in her begged, loneliness begged for nothing. Together they created her own periodic survival; the elements had been outdated again, and therefore the world, which is exactly, she thought, why it deserved a little sigh of praise.
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.