Poem
Patrick McGuinness
Black Box
Black Box
Black Box
Every crashed marriage has its black box, the blow-by-blow account of what went wrong and how,
the crescendo of mistakes that peaks, is for an instant
quiet on its crest of trauma, then drowns itself and us
in a cascade of static. The black box is what survives;
anthracite gleaming in the wreckage where, preserved in anger,
the voices that it holds replay their lifetime of last moments
and speak of how, until the very end, it might all have been
so different; and how, right from the start, they knew it never would.
© 2010, Patrick McGuinness
From: Jilted City
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester
From: Jilted City
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester
Patrick McGuinness
(Tunisia, 1968)
Patrick McGuinness is a poet, novelist, translator and academic, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he has taught since 1998. He lives in North West Wales. His poetry, published by Carcanet, has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003, the Poetry Business Prize in 2006, ...
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Black Box
Every crashed marriage has its black box, the blow-by-blow account of what went wrong and how,
the crescendo of mistakes that peaks, is for an instant
quiet on its crest of trauma, then drowns itself and us
in a cascade of static. The black box is what survives;
anthracite gleaming in the wreckage where, preserved in anger,
the voices that it holds replay their lifetime of last moments
and speak of how, until the very end, it might all have been
so different; and how, right from the start, they knew it never would.
From: Jilted City
Black Box
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