Mary Peelen
On the Permanence of Objects
Detachment is a weird way to pray.
I believe in it, though, in letting go
of a solid sense of things.
Quantum physics proves
matter is probabilistic, nothing absolute
at all, and so I abandoned the sand
dollar my seminary gave me
at graduation, a ritual
object meant to symbolize
grace, I think? Or maybe
the crucifixion. I don’t know.
I’m no monk; my austerity
is partial and chronically
riven with exceptions
made for French confections
and also, weirdly,
this acorn I can’t let go.
Kneeling, sending up thanks
for disaster averted, I claimed it
on an autumn afternoon
in the woods in the south of France,
then dropped it in my coat pocket
for a season or two, forgotten.
Now, I think of it often,
enshrined, as it is, in my drawer,
and I keep wondering what it means
that I’ve kept it so long. Something
inside it holds onto me
like trauma or inbred orthodoxy
I can’t reason away. I was staying
in a hideaway among oak trees,
a cabin heated by a stone fireplace,
part of an artists’ colony up the mountain
from the Mediterranean sea.
The sky was so enormous
there, I could never write
it all down, stars whirring overhead
with dizzying velocity.
Early one morning,
I put the nighttime ashes
in a box on the porch.
I was writing nothing, really,
a novel that never came to be,
when I saw the pillar,
my cabin on fire. Nearly too late,
I hurled dishpans of water
and stomped on red coals—
over and over they re-combusted,
hot, I was exhausted, filthy,
ashen, shaken, weeping for hours
and hours. In penance,
I relinquished heat
for the duration of my stay,
wore my coat and hat all day,
piled sweaters on the bed,
resigned myself to the elements
without hesitation or bitterness
the way an animal retreats
in winter. Weeks later, predawn,
poised as if for a portrait,
a fox lit on my porch,
sunlight stretching up the gorge
in pinks and gold, dazzling
the oaks and the sky. I was very, very
cold. Still wearing its dull cap
the acorn is nestled in a bowl
in my desk alongside paperclips,
rubber bands, hair ties, stamps,
staples, buttons, chapstick,
and a tiny origami star
I keep holding onto, a gift
folded by an artist I once knew
who wasn’t afraid to laugh
at the mercurial ways
of gods and their familiars.
She wrote about trees.
She believed in things,
in objects. She believed absolutely
in stars.
Mary Peelen reads “On the Permanence of Objects”
Mary Peelen is the author of Quantum Heresies, winner of the Kithara Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Review (UK), and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco and Paris.