Why
hast thou set me as a mark against thee,
so that I am a burden to myself?
— Job 7:20 The
bottle stands empty
on the table, sucked dry an
hour ago. The room
spins less
at the floor, so there he
lies, eyes slitted and
pained by the luminous dial
of the electric clock: Every
second throbs and hums. His
tongue lies thick in his mouth, tasting
of something dead. Dust
lies upon dust under the
bed, and strings of dust hang
from the slats. For
now
I shall sleep in the dust; and
thou shalt seek me in the morning, but
I
shall not be.
Gregory
Luce is the author of the
chapbooks Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications) I
have a great admiration for the book of Job
(and Carl Jung’s provocative Answer to Job). Though not a
believer in any
conventional sense, I am always profoundly moved both emotionally and
intellectually by the depiction (in powerful, poetic language) of
the lone human facing an actively hostile universe (personified by God
in this case) with nowhere to turn but to his own resources. I am also
strongly concerned with the issue of addiction, seeing it (again with
Jung) as a spiritual as much as a medical problem. These two concerns
come together in this poem.
and Drinking
Weather (Finishing Line Press). His poems have appeared in numerous
print
and
online journals, including Kansas Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Innisfree
Poetry
Review,
If, Northern Virginia Review, Juke Jar, Praxilla, Little Patuxent
Review, Buffalo Creek Review,
and in the anthology Living in Storms (Eastern
Washington University Press). He lives in
Washington, D.C. where he works as
Production Specialist for the National Geographic Society.
