Let’s Not Fetishize the Negativity
We weren’t watching the waves as they crested, tumbling toward us. That they reiterated canyons, sinking down between high points, we knew without looking. The weather wasn’t a storm denying its destiny but an ephemeral tyrant whose song and custom we adopted. It didn’t keep us angry or evoke the overwhelming idioms of the imagination. What non-interference could have freed us? Nightly wildness had come; sweat embraced it before succumbing to its chill. Addicted to disclosure, addicted to visibility, we were failures that would one day pack it in. Knowing this was a kind of victory.
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"Let’s Not Fetishize the Negativity" first appeared in The Antioch Review.
Gail Wronsky’s most recent book is Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New and Selected Poems (White Pine Press, 2021).
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