Page 9 - Demo

Sculpture
It’s true: sometimes I prefer to caress the representation of draped cloth in marble
or even the lovely declivities of a face, the temples and rounded cheeks, the bridge of the nose, even more than I do
cloth, even silk, or a person in motion, desiring and intending
so many things at once. How can an earlobe of stone
be so soft, I wonder, and hands speak the unequivocal language of hands, gesturing as if they know me?
Not that our vital, confusing world does not appeal to me but its relentless pulsing eludes
the kind of understanding that allows me to believe I am continuous, even when I know better, and I
seem to need that faith more and more as, older, memory relies on an energy contingent, unreliable,
and frustrating. Not even agate entirely fends off entropy but it offers me a way to be in love with time.
The soft stuff, mimetic, even animatronic, doesn’t please me; maybe because I am fooled
so easily so often and already feel ashamed about the ways what I thought to be what it looks like often isn’t,
love, for example, or the public display of remorse that insists I forgive, that calls me hard by comparison,
or probably, Byzantine birds as metaphors notwithstanding, because all a puppet or a doll can do is pretend.
Hoffman has published five books of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road,
winner of the Sheila Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award, and his most recent, People Once Real. His other books include the memoirs Half the House, Love & Fury, Interference and Other Stories, and Remembering the Alchemists and Other Essays. He is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College and nonfiction editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.
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