Lecture Notes

A difficult student, I didn’t see
the Giottos when in Florence, didn’t
visit walled Padua—The attended
galleries were strolled through like aisles
at the grocer when one isn’t hungry—
Appetite widens with time—When I read
Kafka, the pictured objects and landscapes
possess a degree of limitlessness—
I move through immense, tenuous fields,
impossible machines, feel an inner
tightening—It is night in the text—Nine
evenings in Kafka’s October—As though
a lacquered glass architecture was laid,
forced atop the heretofore existing
structures of a dark hillside—I look through
the glass how I listen to dialogue
in another language—Latching onto
familiar verbs and prepositions—
Pleasantly stupefied—A child—
Thinking the eye isn’t seen
by what it sees—Already through the glass
an irreversible change transmitted—

Lecture Notes

It was beside me only briefly—
The winter air quickened, carrying
the sounds of inhuman life—
That other world a pole apart,
streaming parallel along this plane—
Keen, edge-like, isolated—The open air
made and was the world it carried—
I was all person then, familiar,
hungry—Watching—I carved
in the open air a picture that named
this human grief, the near horizon
which was soon erased—A winter wind
rose and made a hard sound against me,
against the impenetrable,
arbitrary human body—Then
another wind from another angle
rose and joined the first, tracing that dim
upper limit, breaking it, reaching
into a sharper suffering I had not known—
The pair of winds hardening in concert—

Sparrow Murray is a transfeminine writer, visual artist, and educator. She is the recipient of the 2024 Stanley and Evelyn Lipkin Prize for Poetry, selected by Chessy Normile. Outside of her poetic practice, she creates glass and paper objects. She produces Poetry Unbound and lives in Brooklyn, New York.