The Almost In Literature

A confessional fragment in which sickness, beer, a Pittsburgh woman singing Hungarian radio, and the wide distance of the bookshelf converge into the feeling of literary incompletion — the 'almost' that cannot be repeated.

A small, sick-stomached lyric about failing to reach the books one means to write. Opening with the bare appeal 'do you hear,' the speaker drinks 'beer lining my belly of a worm' and 'sink[s] to think to quit / my days in forty bottles,' the literary life measured out in empties. The 'pittsburgh woman / singing radio hungarian' supplies the only music across 'the wide distance / of the bookshelf,' a phrase that fixes the title's 'almost': literature sits a room away, near and untouchable, and the final line, 'impossible to repeat,' names both the unrepeatable song on the radio and the work the speaker cannot make his own.