Brett Foster
Ten Definitions
Approximating Grief
-- for Frank Hogrebe
It’s about to be born of the voice, the hysterical caller recorded
on the emergency line.
For this reason convenience stores are dangerous, often robbed
despite the hint of moonlight.
And the man slowly smoking that cigarette at the darkened rest stop
off the interstate—he himself
maintains its stoic version: sparks expire across the parking lot
as the heavy hours pass.
It haunts the moments before work, the days victimized by violent
weather, the one-room nights.
Through the thin wall Pico della Mirandola tries to deny its existence,
says Man, being the center of hierarchy,
is the molder of his own destiny. It suppresses the sound rain makes.
It applauds the minor notes,
finds residence in the keys of the composer’s final piano concerto.
The
theologian who accused
Tertullian of possessing “extreme and rigorous views” has never known it.
The three-legged dog defeats its
greatest manifestation, and though absent in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,
the director of Special Persons’ Camp
sees it always, to see it fall away—farmhouse, roadside morning
glory—and says there and there and there.