"Petty Theft" by Daniel Pritchard

The Gnostic Gospels No. 3: Thursday means we publish a fine, fine poem.

We were lucky to have Daniel Pritchard join us at last summer’s Holy Gossip retreat in Scarborough, Maine. We’re excited to share his new poem, “Petty Theft,” with you all.

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Petty Theft
by Daniel Pritchard


Pale as a dashboard map
left out in the copper afternoon,
her palms were as soft as horsehair.
 
She’d sing against the song on the radio.
 
She would desert herself
on the corduroy sand
        	night after night.
 
Night after night she left
her wet hair on the shore
like a pelt of surrender.
 
Not to exclude
        	the world as it is
        	or could be
but to keepsake         	within herself
the small blue star of a cutout hand.
 
Hard to imagine her fingers
opening with a magnolia’s
impermanence.
 
A trio of framed Pooh bear prints
        	and a single quartz
        	tigress 
 
disappeared the night she
disappeared, the only signs 
 
 
that she might choose to
remember us—
faded roadmarkers
        	to burn in her memory
        	like a paper sun.

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Do you ever have that experience where you read a line that is so wonderful some part of your brain almost doesn’t want to go to the next line ‘cause you feel it just can’t be as good? Like it’s gonna somehow take away the beauty of the first because it can’t live up, or it will be out of tune? Pritchard’s poem begins with a line like that, only to gift a second line as achingly lovely, and then a third—and this feeling recurs until we’re utterly immersed in this world, this music. The images are fresh, the turns careful, the spirit between the words across the poem vibrant and haunting. Disappearence and impermanence are held so vitally against what’s left behind, the longing of keepsake; the sense of who is the object and subject of remembrance and loss is turned back on itself. “She’d sing against the song on the radio.” Goodness, why does this line hit us the way it does?

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Daniel Pritchard is a poet, translator, and essayist, as well as the founding editor of The Critical Flame, an online journal of criticism and creative nonfiction. His writing and translations have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Pangyrus, Harvard Review Online, Missouri Review, the Kenyon Review website, Salamander Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Greater Boston.