so many different hopes

Look Down, Look Down

Referential Existence

Words are so remarkably frustrating. They never fully encapsulate what I am trying to convey… the swirl of thoughts and logical strands, the elegant images and buzz of emotions tingling in my veins… they never flow out of my mouth, instead they tumble and crash like the waves on a beach trying to reach the dunes but failing because their shoes have been tied together and so they fall on their face and are dragged back to the sea of confused meaninglessness by the moon, which doesn’t even make any sense because the moon is so far away so how can its influence reach us.  These things, these letters and words are so limiting so constraining so endless so infinite so definable so utterly incomprehensible…

I took a poetry class in my final year of college.  I sat in a desk,
watching our professor try to pull the strands
just enough to let the light come through the impressions painted with pens,
just enough to get a glimpse of the supple curves and delicate skin,
without shedding the fullness of the harsh light that would shatter the seduction.
Just enough to convince us that we are not alone in our aloneness,
that others, too, are thwarted in their attempted sharing of the solitary oneness of self,
looking to the tilted mirrors of those around them, disappointed.¹
Yes, and²
That others, too, recognize words as an elegy to what they signify,³
wavering between being and loss, awash in an incommunicable sea of existing.
That others, too, have sensed the strangeness of holding an unusable, yet somehow beautiful, broken tile of memory ⁴ in hand with a gentle wondering of what to do
that others, too, feel themselves at the center of a powerful and baffled will,⁵
Yes, and that others, too, are desperately avoiding erasure⁶
Aware of oblivion’s inevitability⁷
And the feeling or fact that
what has been done will be done again
and that there is nothing new under the sun⁸
And that originality is a myth
And that why is ultimately unanswerable

And so,

Vladimir:             What do we do now?
Estragon:             Wait.
Vladimir:             Yes, but while waiting.⁹

 

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¹ Hass, Robert. “The Apple Trees at Olema.” The Apple Trees at Olema. Harper Collins, 2010.
² Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.
³ Hass, Robert. “Meditation at Lagunitas.” The Apple Trees at Olema. Harper Collins, 2010.
⁴ Hass, Robert. “Novella.” The Apple Trees at Olema. Harper Collins, 2010.
⁵ Hass, Robert. “Misery and Splendor.” The Apple Trees at Olema. Harper Collins, 2010.
⁶ See footnote 2.
⁷ Reference to John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars
⁸ Ecclesiastes 1:9
⁹ Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. Grove Press, 1954.