Fire Sermon - Hardcover

JAMIE QUATRO is the author of I Want To Show You More. She is a visiting professor in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program, a contributing editor at Oxford American, and lives with her husband and children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.

June 2017
Dear James:
Sometimes, when I’m home alone, I listen to myself repeat our dates aloud, like a litany:
Nashville, July 2014
New York, September 2016
Chicago, April 2017
(Lord, lamp unto my feet and light unto my path―how is it possible?)
I’m still reading the blue book. It’s painful, the way she writes about loss. I can only take it in small amounts. The ancients, she says, disagreed as to whether we perceived objects, or objects perceived us. Do our eyes throw out a beam, like a lantern, that illuminates them? Or do the objects send out rays which, reaching our eyes, reveal them to us―as if they’re looking back? Plato, she writes, split the difference: a visual fire burning between the eye and the object it beholds.
I cannot help applying these ideas to love. Its location in a physical sense. Was it something we carried in ourselves―something I sent out to you, and you sent out to me? Or did it exist independently, a potential fire hovering in the middle space between us, appearing only when we looked at one another? In which case, the second we stopped looking, the fire disappeared. Hence my use of the past tense. (But dear God I want to use the present. I want to keep looking, to gaze at length.)