Book of Error
by Nicholas Gulig
To see and fail to speak from far away of seeing, to go about a life, to write to friends and of them, to begin within their names, to wish them well and end in yours, sincerely, to drive to work in a green car singing, to have insurance, to listen to the radio, the county road in autumn, the light collected in the maples, in the birches, beautiful, to mouth the words of others, to believe them, to feel their language is your own, to own them momentarily, to feel ashamed of owning, to stare into the open windows of your house, to stand beside your wife, in the center of your yard, living, breathing, in the middle of October, the leaves around you, everywhere around you, to watch your daughter, to listen to her laughter fill you. From far away across the yard, it fills you. And then to know within the poem the noise that other people make when suffering. Enough to love them, to wish them well, you needed them imagined. You made them up, the people. What are people? And so it was you came to speak alone, a soul composed beyond the finite boundary of an ethics. Etched into an opening and closing space, the sound of “it” compressed with “it is not,” their echoing, your ache
(via sh)
