On Nothing

The problem is the dissection problem.
Is it too much or too little love for the world
that moves one to despair in this life about
the despair of nothing after life, which this
life briefly — badly — interrupts?
It is true, that nothing is unfamiliar to us,
accustomed as we are to linoleum, wool snoods,
hands in pockets feeling the working hip bone.
But nothing is not despair, nor dark, nor pain;
it is none of these, and that is the point.
So if driven by fear of nothing, despair
is a simple mistake, a bit of a joke.

And what a waste of the gaping something to think
that because it is over soon, it is a groaning effort
to haul the sun each morning, to scurry around
a pyramid of footstools, improbable beings, frantic
as mimes to prop up marvels that wobble toward
drains or manholes. And too, it's unclear that eternity
has claim to meaning, or that if we had longer —
forever say — we could do better than we do
at five in a wagon, at eighty brushing the hair
from the forehead of a new youth. Eternity
seems an unlikely place to look for more.
Those twin prongs of before and after seem
merely to hold the middle ground like skewers
on summer corn so we may bring it tidily to our lips.
                                                                                          
In fact, we don't know that there is nothing.
All that we are and all that we aren't — it's not that.
The process of oceans grinding shells to sand
and sucking it back for bottom dwellers —
it's not even that. Zero is our invention,
an idea for which there is no evidence.
The great metaphor of empty space is false,
full of red suns rising in every direction.
A vacuum is light. A leg severed is memory.
A child unborn is aching regret or relief.
An accident avoided is a picnic by the road
with Dairy Queen burgers in thin tissue wrappings.

Except that we think of it, and on occasion,
groping for a nameless quarter, will feel the pull
of a thing beyond reckoning. But to think of it, even
to name it nameless means: that is not what we face.
Either our minds are famously unreliable
and we should get on with folding napkins and sheets
steaming from the iron, or our thoughts are not aliens,
rather emitted from nature like shad-roe, oxides,
uranium and burls. If so, these conceptual visions
of nothing, at which we excel, are pictures
of home, to be admired more stringently.

Selected for Best America Poetry 1990, edited by Jorie Graham
First published in The Hudson Review; revised slightly, 2024
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