Reasonable Things

A poem about a distorted world.

We are taught to fear what appears monstrous, what arrives visibly misshapen or broken from the ordinary shape of things. Yet perhaps the deeper danger is not distortion, but decorum. We live in a world where terror has been made presentable, where menace has been tidied and dressed for company, while truth waits elsewhere, plain and overlooked. The contrast is not so much between fantasy and reality as between honest absurdity and concealed violence. A distorted world may unsettle us, but at least it admits what it is. The more dangerous world is the one that insists on appearing coherent, civil, and trustworthy even as something essential has gone wrong within it. There is also a fading belief that questions can still lead us cleanly to the truth, that the world, if approached sincerely, might still gather itself into an answer. Yet truth remains, humble and barefoot, not triumphant, but not gone either.

“The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.” —William B. Yeats

Reasonable Things

I hook one finger
under the linen tablecloth,
testing the hem
of the dying afternoon.

I am the rabbit having tea with Alice,
though not the one who made it.
This is no Wonderland.

Wonderland, at least,
would have the courage of distortion.
But this place wants praise
for being reasonable.

Alice asks who made the tea.
She still believes questions
are a kind of lantern,
that if you lift them, the world
will answer whole.

I know terror enters
more deeply when it wipes its feet first.
Its menace has been lint-rolled,
its intentions had their shoes polished.
Meanwhile truth stands barefoot
in the scullery,
holding a chipped plate.

Miriam H. Monarres

Photo by Sven Lachmann.

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