The Fury Was Correct
When the fury came I didn’t fight it, I let it run its course.
I sat in the exact center of it and I let it be the source
of everything I needed to understand about what had happened,
about the exact nature of the wrong and how it had been fashioned
into something that was plausible and even reasonable looking
from the outside,
while the inside was a different kind of booking.
And the fury saw through the plausible
and named the actual thing,
and I trusted the fury and the fury was the ring
of clarity around the central fact I’d been avoiding in the haze
of the accommodation and the management of the gaze
that I’d been doing for the months before the fury arrived
and told me in no uncertain terms that I had survived
the situation by a narrower margin than I’d told myself,
and that the accommodation had cost too much, and the shelf
life of my willingness to absorb had run out at last,
and the fury arrived precisely and the fury held it fast.
The fury was correct and I trusted it exactly right,
the fury was the accurate instrument that night.
It cut through all the story I’d been telling and it named
the person and the thing and it’s not ashamed
of what it did, it did its job, it gave me the account
that all the careful reasonable analysis couldn’t surmount.
The fury was correct and I’m grateful it arrived,
without the fury and its accuracy I don’t know if I’d have survived.
Fury gets a bad reputation because the scatter kind
is the one that everyone has seen, the one that leaves behind
a damage that extends far past the origin of the thing.
The scatter fury is the kind that people talk about, the sting
that everyone remembers because it hit them all,
not just the source.
And I understand the reputation and I understand the course
of events that built it, but I want to make a case
for the fury that arrived with an address and a face.
The fury that knew what it was for and stayed inside the bounds
of the actual wrong and didn’t spread beyond the grounds
of the person and the act and the cost.
The fury that arrived as information about what I’d almost lost.
The fury that stayed focused and said here,
this, this person, this.
The fury that was pointing with precision at the abyss
that I’d been walking next to without knowing it was there.
The fury was the signal and the fury had the care.
I’ve been told the fury was disproportionate and I’ve been told
that the fury was a symptom of something older, something cold
and buried in me that predated the event.
And I’ve done the work to check if that’s what the fury meant,
and what I found is that the fury was a fair response to a fair target,
and that the fury’s proportionality is harder to discount than it
looks from the outside of the situation and the circumstance.
The fury was the accurate response, that’s my final stance.
And I’ll say it clearly
for the record because the record should have it:
the fury was the first honest thing about the situation
and it had it
right from the beginning and I trusted it and the trust was paid
back in the form of clarity about what trade
had been made at my expense and what it was worth and who
made it, and I’ve been standing in that clarity and the view
from here is clean and accurate and the fury was the path
to here, and the fury was correct in its honest aftermath.
I don’t need anyone to validate the fury at this point.
I’ve done my own accounting and I’ve assessed the joint
cost and benefit of having trusted it and what I find
is that the fury opened every room I needed in my mind
to understand the situation and to see it clearly and to know
what my next step was and what the answer was and so
I trust the fury retrospectively and prospectively as well.
The fury was correct and the fury rang the bell.