Against Consolation

Robert Cording

The lecturer is talking
about Weil’s essay on “Detachment.”
The scent of lilacs
intoxicates the air inside the room,

cut branches brought in
to represent the flowering outside,
spring flaring up again like those beliefs, I imagine,

Weil warns against –
Beliefs which fill up the voids and sweeten
What is bitter. A thousand
Miles from here, you have given up

Belief in the providential
Ordering of events. No proverb sweetens
Your suffering. What endures
Is you bewilderment – the freakish

Wheel of that truck
Breaking off and hurtling through
The sunlit air, not enough
Time to say Look out or even Shit,

Before it struck
Your car, one of the hundreds lined up
In rush-hour traffic
On the other side of the highway.

You told me, the more
You think, the less you understand.
You can’t explain
The roof caved in all around you,

Your two friends buried
Under metal, and you, who sat alongside
Them, untouched.
Home from the hospital, your friends

Dead, you went to
The kitchen, and everything, you said,
Was just as you left it,
As if the accident were only and interruption

In daily life, a tornado
That leaves the kitchen table set for dinner.
The contradictions the mind
Comes up against – these are the only realities:

They are the criterion
Of the real. Weil again, who believes
We come to know
Our radical contingency only through

Such contradictions.
We must suffer them unconsoled.
“Let the accident go,”
Your friends tell you, “Don’t hold on” –

What we say, I fear,
To rid ourselves of the pain we feel
When your pain closes
In on us. It’s late in the afternoon

And the rustling
Of the feet and papers has begun. I look out
The window – a gusty wind
Polishes the morning’s rain-washed glass

Of air, and the late sun
Lavishes each new green with its shine.
I’d like to dismiss Weil’s
haunted, unnerving life as my colleague

quickly does, the lecture
ended: “Brilliant, but crazy.” Anorexic,
psychotic, suicidal. Labels
that fit, I suppose, and yet I cannot deny

the stark attraction
of her words. Stay with you suffering,
I’ve heard her say

Over and over today, always the extremist.

The last time I saw you,
I knew you lived at the border of what is
Bearable, that you’d seen
The skeleton underneath all your thought,

Everything stripped
Of sense or summation; you knew
Your friends’ deaths
Would make no more sense in time

And you would have
To live in the knowledge – no, not
Knowledge, the word
Itself a king of consolation, but the void

Weil speaks of,
Where you cannot escape the skewed
Wheel of a truck, the blood
On you hands, the voice you still have

That calls out, O God, no,
The scent of lilacs that pierce the air
Each spring for no cause,
Beautifully innocent of meaning.

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