And now, a poem from a fine young American poet, Marcela Sulak. It's the first in her new collection Of all the Things that Don't Exist, I Love You Best, which can be bought on Amazon at that link, or directly from the publisher here (it's a funky small press, so you'll have to scroll down 4/5 of the way):
Exiting Central Park
The important thing is to be burdened with your emptiness
– not as a pregnant woman balancing across the street,
for your emptiness belongs only to you and no one
placed it there. Nor are you like a barrel of rainwater
collecting ripples and images. Nor are you a shadow
or a sun. The necessary thing when you are
standing still is to have a place to go. To have something
that should be done or could be done
or at least begun. Consider when your hands
are gathering up strange letters—and they are prone
to slide—they are not grains or seed or keys to a mystery,
though they are not yours, or to a house or a heart.
Bells are not syllables, slaps are not chrysanthemums.
Dictionaries will give you nothing. There is no language
in your blood, no hurt under your boot heels.
What is gliding on the lake is gliding away,
it is looking for fish and frogs. It cannot speak
to you, nor can the oak that drops its button acorns
and moves its arms in the wind. And the children
walking hand in hand before you in the reeds
are only going home to supper. The sun
is setting. It is only the end of the day.
To remember: it's better not to look for things
or pick them up. Stay out of libraries and away
from electrical outlets, hospital rooms and theatres,
from secretaries, businessmen and all who traffic
in similes, stock, grain, meat, desire, daisies
snails and shipping. Stay out of suitcases,
closets, diaries, milk pails, washing machines,
Beware of stockroom boys, of grandmothers
with their heavy tablets of bread, bakers and their ilk.
And yet, it isn't good to be alone. Not too much alone.
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