Sublime

mbeles

anathema

Alice Walker writes in her 1972 poem “Reassurance,” “I must love the questions / themselves / as [the poet] Rilke said / like locked rooms / full of treasure / to which my blind / and groping key / does not yet fit.”

So soon. So soon. She hadn’t even begun the trip back. Back to her grandmother’s house in the city where the red shutters glowed, and already she had been called “gal.”

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would