Empty II

Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

Mary Oliver

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Love Song: The Reproduction of Mothering (1)

from The Making of the Mother: Portraits        Marcia Aldrich

This is a mother who still holds her daughter's hand when they're walking down the street. Her daughter is 18 years old. This is a mother who wants her daughter to look and act and be just like her. This is a daughter who does not resist what her mother wants. As the years pass this is a daughter who is becoming her mother. This is a mother who is always receding into the background. This is a mother who is always refilling platters, emptying trash, washing dishes. This is a daughter who with each passing year is receding into the background, watching her brother from the wings doing his tricks, clapping along with her mother and others. This is a mother who wears little Sunday school white gloves to bed to keep her hands innocent. This is a daughter who in time will too.


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Peach                                            Catie Rosemurgy

The head, the mouth, the fruit, the eating.

The pit, the teeth, the branch, the fall.
The wet, the swollen, the light, the seeing.
The picking, the washing, the cutting, the quartering.
The sweet, the having.

The juice. The holding it in your hands

beautiful and then ruined. The forms of devouring. The remaining empty.
What’s inside.

The excitement of the definite article. What’s inside

one thing is analogous to what’s inside another.
The ceremonial names

of what is done to them. What is unknown requires a new way of cutting.

What we’re left with.

How we make an object ours, make it disappear.

How we become the object and are food.
How we are delicious and dead at the center in so many ways.
How that is wrong and it is stillness, moon-like at the core.
How what we are is what reflects off it. How we are light produced earlier
by other things.

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A poem is an empty suitcase that you can never quit emptying. Kay Ryan

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"For What Binds Us"                                  Jane Hirschfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

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The true contemplative is not the one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect or anticipate the word that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and when is “answered,” it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God.

Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, p. 112-3

Empty

Gone                                                      Malena Morling, from Five Points

          The world
is gone
      like the exact
shape of a cloud
          or the exact shape
of a hand waving
      in the sunlight
from across
          a crowded
train-station
      parking-lot
to another hand
          that waves back.

Come to think of it,
      everything up to now
is gone.
          And I have also
already left
      even though
I still ride
          the train
through the outskirts
      of the city.

And I still sit
          by the window,
the filthy
      train-window
while what is left
          of the demolished
buildings
      go past
and the empty
          billboards
and the transitory
      architecture.

It's amazing
          we're not
more amazed.
      The world
is here
          but then it's gone
like a wave
      traveling toward
other waves.

          Or like
the delicate white
      spaceships
of the Dogwood
          that float
as if there were
      no gravity,
as if there were
          no moments
isolated from
      any other
moments
          anywhere.


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Everything that seems empty is full of the angels of God.  St. Hilaire, fourth-century bishop (and patron saint against snake bites)

 

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Empty similes                                                                  Bob Hicok

Like standing in front of a woman who says thank you
when you tell her you love her, that stuck

sound of a crow, pulling the one nail from its voice
outside your window and you

going down to the sea too late, where it was
three million years ago, waving your little towel
at the shadow of waves, like dropping

your stomach when you drop the phone,
a voice spinning at the end of the chord, your mother,
father, everyone

dead, even the person telling you
gone and you
waving your metronome arm, and time

inside the trees making clocks we check
by cutting them down.

 

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Genesis                 Herman de Coninck, tr. By Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown

It was the sixth day. Adam was ready.
He saw the oaks firmly rooted
in the void. Power is a matter of branching.
He had seen the mountains, vast storerooms holding
only themselves, high empty cellars.
And deer. With legs as thin as stethoscopes
they stood listening to the breast of the earth,
and as soon as they heard something, they ran away,
inventing pizzicato as they fled the horizon.
And he had seen the sea, the busy swelling and receding
that makes one calm. And the empty, provocative gestures
of the wind, come along, come along, though no one followed.
And the depths, gulfs that make one uneasy. And being silent,
because that's what everything was doing, and being too big.
Then God said: and now you. No, said Adam.

 

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Bats                                                                 Paisley Rekdal

unveil themselves in dark.
They hang, each a jagged,

silken sleeve, from moonlit rafters bright
as polished knives. They swim

the muddied air and keen
like supersonic babies, the sound

we imagine empty wombs might make
in women who can't fill them up.

A clasp, a scratch, a sigh.
They drink fruit dry.

And wheel, against feverish light flung hard
upon their faces,

in circles that nauseate.
Imagine one at breast or neck,

patterning a name in driblets of iodine
that spatter your skin in stars.

They flutter, shake like mystics.
They materialize. Revelatory

as a stranger's underthings found tossed
upon the marital bed, you tremble

even at the thought. Asleep,
you tear your fingers

through your damp neck hair
and search the sheets all night.

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Future Tense                                                                                                                                                                                                              Charles Wright

All things in the end are bittersweet—
An empty gaze, a little way-station just beyond silence.

If you can’t delight in the everyday,
                                                         you have no future here.

And if you can, no future either.

And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
                                                            and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move.