The deer have fled from us. And us not us anymore.
We were pure energy without wisdom.
We swam toward the surface
as if there were a school of us.
We were a multitude.
How strange to have left the world
to understand which is more puzzling:
the existence of suffering or its absence.
We need negative space —like fog in a Japanese painting,
like a shell that falls away
so the bird can emerge.
Source text from Poetry Daily September 22-30, 2009.
Chase Twichell - Weird Hotel;
Ken Fontenot - Friends 1956;
David Baker - Trillium;
Michael Gizzi - The Deep;
Franz Wright - Intake Interview;
Allison Funk - The Escape Artist in Winter;
Albert Goldbarth - Empty Poem;
Louise Glück - At the River
We were pure energy without wisdom.
We swam toward the surface
as if there were a school of us.
We were a multitude.
How strange to have left the world
to understand which is more puzzling:
the existence of suffering or its absence.
We need negative space —like fog in a Japanese painting,
like a shell that falls away
so the bird can emerge.
Source text from Poetry Daily September 22-30, 2009.
Chase Twichell - Weird Hotel;
Ken Fontenot - Friends 1956;
David Baker - Trillium;
Michael Gizzi - The Deep;
Franz Wright - Intake Interview;
Allison Funk - The Escape Artist in Winter;
Albert Goldbarth - Empty Poem;
Louise Glück - At the River
