But I could not think of what.

In N. I lost
what had been dear to me.
I searched high and low
wondering where I'd left it
and gave up hope of finding it
and the fear of never finding it again.
I puzzled with downcast eyes,
forgot which way I had come
and then the smell of wood and tar, the color
of ashes,
and I forgot a year and a day,
sat on a bench in the park
for as long as I could remember,
could no longer find time,
no longer knew who I was, that man
sitting there so thoughtfully
as if he were thinking of something dear to him.

-Toon Tellegen, "I" from In N.

First it starts with the eyes to spare the man from witnessing his own vanishing. He would not believe it if he saw it. Then the hearing goes. This ensures that he does not hear his own groans, the complaint of the loved one telling him he’s left his foot by the door. Then the memory recedes. The man cannot remember his foot or ever having a foot. The man does not remember seeing it attached, despite the failure of his vision. The man cannot recall hearing the floorboards creak beneath his weight. This makes the man sad, though he can’t remember the cause of his sorrow. And so it goes… and so it goes.

-Oliver de la Paz, "How Domingo Disappears"

"to go without
comes naturally to me now, it costs me
almost nothing anymore.
I have let them go for so long,
and so profoundly,
that if you asked me about it I couldn't say
exactly what they were
and if I really wanted them. Their place
inside my head is empty.
Even the sense of missing them
has left no trace."

-Umberto Flori, from "Face"

(thanks to

6 notes "An attentiveness to this world can excavate,
rather than fill,
the depths of my five senses.

An ear, as a cavity, might attune to its own empty space
and thereby grow more familiar with
the resonances in other absences."
— Rusty Morrison, from “Commonplace”

13 notes "It makes sense. The sun rises
without guarantee. There is no promise

in sleep but an innocence
we’re never witness to.

I am my own skeleton…

Have faith

that absence is simple death
to all expectation. I cut flowers

to save them from the bees."
— Andrew Kozma, from “In What Mode Faith Should Be Kept By Princes”

11 notes "The port grows dark. Across the bay, inmates in the island prison stroke their sweaty bellies. Rain washes the streets, as if before an earthquake. Somewhere two hands clap steadily till morning. In the bus station a boy and a girl have their picture taken. While he stays still. Absent. Mumbling the names of those he loves. In fevered sleep the man next to him turns over on his side, almost raises his head, as if the names he’ll never learn to pronounce have stolen into his leaden dreams, and then he sinks back under the blanket. The dull ache in his chest doesn’t stop. In the room: perfect peace, aging wooden beams. He tries to cry. Fails. In the bakeries the Chinese start to work.

San Francisco, October 1986"
— Aleš Debeljak, from “Ways of Saying Goodbye” tr. Christopher Merrill and the author

8 notes "

Celan’s poems, exclusive of Zeitgehoft… exist in a standard two-volume edition in German. The first volume, containing all of his poems through Niemandsrose, displays a fragment from an early poem on the back cover: ‘…At the eastern window, the slender wanderer-phantom of feeling appears at night.’ The second volume begins with Atemwende, a turning of the breath, which not only points us due north, toward the ‘wintering over’ which its contents delineate, but also suggests the notion, well-known to Celan, who was an acquaintance of Gershom Scholem, of the Lurianic Kabbalists, of the Zimzum. The word describes the act of divine contraction that precedes emanations, the moment of God’s breathing in so as to make room for his creation—its consequence being the absence of God in the fallen world, a negative theology elaborated by the similar reticence of the maker of the poems…

Sometimes, however,
the sky dies
ahead of
our shards.

In the second volume we are pulled within the visionary borders of Celan’s late poems, where familiar things have fallen away.

"
— Katharine Washburn, from Paul Celan: Last Poems

77 notes "

I’m nothing and can therefore never be locked up or even captured really
since I’m the absence that lies in the center of a lake
and you are a boat in bloody water

I’m the clouds I just coagulated did you see that
you must be some earlier life since I’m the retrograde hail that starts to fall
you’re mathematical, migration, a boyscout carrying a canteen

I’m a bridge with a flag on it you’re the sound rising from a radio station
you’re the trill of a river I’m an obstruction in the rock salt road
you’re a crucified rune or rock carving

after the third or fourth sedative I’m something small or spin dried
and you’re a bull in a labyrinth
I’m a labyrinth

I’m a cretin with icing smeared all over my face you’re like some
pre-Columbian hieroglyph, your cogent arpeggio intellect still intact
I’m marcasite quicklime saffrom timothy

"
— Lynn Behrendt, “I’m Nothing and Can Therefore Never Be Locked Up or Even Captured Really”

4 notes

“…but the smallest part & learn from that
to make do without sinking back into my own
absence”

— Jacob Russell, from “Poem to the End of My Days”

17 notes "i.

I am a fool
The soul has a shadow
The shadow drained the meaning from words
I was left with a few words, nonsense
I had simple things, a chair, a spoon, a smooth gray rock
I began to understand
Science is small, even frightened
Beneath it all, in our homelessness, there is nothing we possess
Now I will draw a picture
I said I am a fool
I draw what I see when I draw
The world is inarticulate
Once, I listened to a stone wall the way you would listen to a river
I began to speak its absent language
Stripped of everything but beginnings, I stayed on the cusp
The language of the passing world is make do
I began to speak this absent language"
— Rick London, from “The Receptive: A Radio Play” (a monologue in the person of the elderly C. G. Jung) (via)

2 notes "The third person remains beyond your threshold while I and you resemble each other. This makes her wonder is she really a person. And if no person, what? Touches the printed page as a talisman, as if its precise reference could teach her to be acknowledged by your stare even when the maple, the rain, the street, the park, all turn absent."
— Rosmarie Waldrop, from “Third Person Singular”

27 notes "

No one invents an absence;
Cadmium yellow, duckweed, the capercaillie
- see how the hand we would name restrains itself
till all our stories end in monochrome;

the path through the meadow
reaching no logical end; nothing but colour: bedstraw and ladies’ mantle;
nothing sequential; nothing as chapter and verse.

No one invents the quiet that runs in the grass,
the summer wind, the sky, the meadowlark;
and always the gift of the world, the undecided:
first light and damson blue ad infinitum.

"
— John Burnside, “Si Dieu n’existait pas” (via)

11 notes "and this is then the dream of language,
of those who’ve left, and left us with their absence."
— Lytton Smith, from “”Annuls the Space/Time Experience”