10-12-2026​

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Anne Carson​

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5.1

What he needed from me I have no idea. When I caught up to him in high school (he was older by four years) he liked me to do his homework but that wasn’t it. My moral advice he brushed aside, you’re different. He called me professor or pinhead, epithets implying intellectual respect but we never had a conversation about ideas in our life. And when he telephoned me—out of the blue—about half a year after our mother died he had nothing to say.

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5.2

His voice was like his voice with something else crusted on it, black, dense - it lighted up for a moment when he said “pinhead” (So pinhead d’you attain wisdom yet?) then went dark again. All the years and time that had passed over him came streaming into me, all that history. What is a voice?

 

5.3

My brother’s widow tells me that when she first met him (Amsterdam) he was penniless. He walked into the bar and she looked up and said, That one I want to marry. They lived for two years on the street, sleeping in stairwells, eating once a week, this was after Anna, drinking a lot. Stairwell smell (I remember) him huddling in the stairwell where we kept our coats and boots winter Sunday blood on his face he was about nine and my mother around him with all her hands crying What now oh what now?

 

5.4

My brother’s widow takes me to the church called Sankt Johannes where the funeral was held two weeks ago. It is white and clean as an eggshell inside. I like cleanliness. My brother didn’t care so much. When he came to stay with me in 1978, two weeks before he ran away, the apartment got dirty, cigarette butts everywhere and at last I was glad he moved on. One morning he butted a cigarette in a frying pan on the stove, sunny side up.

 

5.5

What comes to me now, as I kneel in a church in Copenhagen listening to long Danish gospels and letting the sheets of memory blow on the line, is that both my parents were laid out in their coffins (years apart, accidentally) in bright yellow sweaters. They looked like beautiful peaceful egg yolks. I have always admired the design of the egg - yellow circle within a white oval, as impeccable as Herodotos’ explanation of the old wise saying Custom is king of all:

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Darius…summoned some Greeks and asked them for how much money they would be willing to eat their dead parents. But they answered that they would not do such things for any amount of money. And after that Darius summoned some Indians (called Kallatiai), who eat their parents, and asked them for what price they would agree to burn their dead fathers with fire. But they shouted aloud and bid him not to speak blasphemy. Thus these things are established by custom and quite right is Pindar, it seems to me, when he says in a poem Custom is king of all. (3.38.1–3)

 

5.6

When my parents died I chose not to eat but to burn them. Then I buried the ashes under a stone cut with their names. For my brother I had no choice, I was a thousand miles away. His widow says he wanted to be cast in the sea so she did this. There is no stone and as I say he had changed his name.

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-from Nox

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Anne Carson (born June 21, 1950) is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and classicist who won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. Learn more here.