This poem comes from my third and final self-published book, To Kiss the Sun and Mean It. That book title comes from Bruce Cockburn's song, "Dialogue With the Devil (Why Don't We Celebrate?)," (© 1971 Golden Mountain Music Corp) which is on his True North Records album, Sunwheel Dance. If you don't have that album, go out and buy it now. This blog post will still be here when you get back.
Great song, isn't it?
If you know me, you know I have an irrational love for my hometown, Detroit. I have what I call a "chosen delusion" that when people hear I'm from Detroit, they'll be jealous. Some of that creeps into this poem, and I think it's related to Jerry Herron's complaint regarding a LA Times article in the early '90s:
In what has become characteristic fashion, the reporter’s irony is founded on the still more ironic (if unself-conscious) assumption that a city so overfilled with human misery can be written about as if it were empty. (AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993, p. 83)
Herron argues that the city (in general, and also, specifically, Detroit) has become unintelligible in the latter half of the 20th century, because, following suburbanization during the post-war period, the city no longer orders (most) people's lives or scripts their (consumer) desires. Furthermore, many outsiders looking at Detroit don't recognize anything that is central to their idea of what a "city" is, so they fail to see what is actually there. In this instance, the reporter had focused on vegetation taking over and pheasants roaming the streets.
However, this poem was written before I'd read Herron's book, so what he says didn't influence me directly, but I think it articulates quite well some of what I was intuiting.
Still, that's not the whole story to this poem. Frankly, I don't know what is. If you figure it out, leave a comment below - I'd love to hear your reading of this. I don't know who "you" is in this poem. Many of my poems have a "you" in them, and it's generally a placeholder, as if the poem were a template that might fit over a number of different "you"s and "me"s.
Other brief notes:
Once you've read enough of my poems, you'll get the sense that I'm not fond of the color white. If you've met me, that won't surprise you.
There's a bit of a reference to Kierkegaard in the second stanza. Just a bit.
I was living in Palmer Park when I wrote this, presumably in 1999.
The lack of punctuation at the end is intentional.
THERE IS NO NOTHING
Absence is presence: the white space
that colors the page, gesturing form, forging
memories from static words and images;
Your absence is all that I have now.
A whitish light seeps in,
establishing the boundaries
of this stolid afternoon.
Life is only getting longer. This loneliness,
this treasure, hangs, useless
and empty, across this pallid room.
I believe that you faded away into night,
drawn into the womb of that becoming
by the gravity of your longing: now Eternity
illuminates the scope of your being.
Out my window, there is your shadow: my alley view,
flat-lit by stagnant sun; the same mundane scene
sprawling. Urban changelessness. Undying decay.
I want to climb down to the street,
scoop up armfuls of garbage, kiss
the liquor bottle shards, caress the brokenness
of potholes, run my fingers through the weeds
that push up from the sidewalk cracks. I want
to know the sacred absence here,
even through its suffering: these rich wounds
bleed a richer promise,
a destiny of dying
to become
PS: I should note that I sought, and received, gracious permission from True North to use that Bruce Cockburn quote for my book title. In one of life's weird coincidences, I received the permission on a Monday (or a Tuesday - I don't remember now) in a week when I was going to see Cockburn play the Crisler Arena in Windsor that Friday. At the show, he played that song, introducing it by saying he finally understood what it was about. I'd love to know what he'd concluded - I have my own reading. But what timing, eh? He'd been on tour for a while, presumably singing that song all along. Still, I was floored to hear it live in that moment.
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