Chris Adrian | Gob's Grief | 2001

Dear Gob,

I think about you sometimes, your grieving machine, your madness, your home flooded and iced, you, skating, shaky and flushed, across your parlor to Maci. I live in your city but your world is gone, its war just a story, told with gore or glory, a simple equation, who won and who didn't, your real struggles lost. Many struggle now, but what for. Our wars are constant and distant, inspire madness in few, and that’s our collective madness I wonder sometimes what you’d do with. Would you build us a machine to bring back not the dead but our knowledge of loss? Would you try to unblind us, would Walt, would Wil build again his house of glass battlefield negatives, give borrowed life to those images of the dead, fixed while still living, fixed against forgetting? Or would you leave us to live, and join us, singing our songs of ourselves?

Sincerely,
Nicki


P.S. Please thank your mother for me.