Keeping Things Whole

(Mark Strand)


In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

"A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, / A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, / Which finds no natural outlet or relief / In word, or sigh, or tear."


-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-

One line, another.

Twilight is almost here.
Someone just sighed.
Repression is maddening.
Last night's laughter and songs have been left on last night's doorstep.
One realizes that one has to move with the hours.
The minutes go by and soon we find ourselves in the same second, on the same spot.
Nothing stays where you put it.
The heart sinks more often than one wishes it to.
Help me give a name to this absence between us.
We connect one certainty to another and come up with uncertainty.
Stop wondering what will happen next.
If I knock, will you let me in?
Good night.

Roof

four years ago, she was a brown, bent object hunched amongst six years worth of her life--six years' worth, four years ago--wrapped in black garbage bags, huddled, doleful, in the jagged, empty space enough to fit four wheels, a body, just one, in the empty lot beneath the trees--

--the trees. Even now, she thanks those trees, the shade that made the sun's glare seem less harsh, kinder than how he put six years'--no, six years' and a lifetime's--worth of her into those bags as if they were trash

How quickly we size each other up.

But if I ever found myself where you are now, would I be able to stand up and move forward?

And do you think you could retrace the steps I took--without bitterness, without self-reproach--before I reached this spot?