Lara Candland’s Comments

I am sitting at a dining table by a window and the kids are at school and the sun is out and I’m looking at the grandest mountains I know. I’m with Emily. Or, maybe, it’s dreary outside and the kids are at home and it’s noisy, and the grand mountain is green, red, white, or slate. I’m sure all were true, but I remember the first scenario as being the main truth now.

I’m with Emily.

What I’m thinking: when did an optizan become and optician? And what instruments did the optizan use? And how did he know what to do? Did he prescribe a spectacle yet, or was only a pince nez in use at the time? A monocle? Did he grind his own lenses? What, exactly, was his job? And when did Emily’s lexicon become unfashionable?

But she was always unfashionable. So was it fashion or Emily that retrieved the odd words and lines and meters from existing matter and shaped them into her poems?

I sit with Emily every day for a year. We sit. We sit. We are both very quiet, like to be alone, to look at things. To ask questions with no satisfactory answers.

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