Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
and today Proust paints distance
glass jars—
the village children
lower them
into the Vivonne for minnows
crystal containers offlowing crystal
insoluble glass impalpable water
_
the fish flashing,
caught and carried for bait
come, time, come
bite,
that child-once-was
that splash in a jar
Based on passages from C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin’s translation of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, with revisions by D. J. Enright.
Mary Buchinger is the author of three poetry collections: e i n f ü h l u n g / in feeling (Main Street Rag, 2018), Aerialist (Gold Wake, 2015, shortlisted for the May Swenson Poetry Award, the OSU Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize for Poetry, and the Perugia Press Prize), and Roomful of Sparrows (Finishing Line, 2008). Her poems have appeared in DIAGRAM, Gargoyle, AGNI, Salamander, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She received both the Daniel Varoujan and the Firman Houghton Awards from the New England Poetry Club and was an invited poet at the Library of Congress. She is currently president of the New England Poetry Club and professor of English and Communication Studies at MCPHS University in Boston. (updated 10/2018)