The Great Weight of the World!

If I Could Have A Baby With Symmetry or Another Solid Object

Surely, this sweat isn’t the same sweat

It couldn’t be. There’s no sizzle

Pop or stop to missing your 

Hair kinking up with enthuse—

my greatest pleasure. Your eyes

In teaching moments. In real time

my world swells and this is almost

Too much to bear as I was born

With narrow shoulders so that’s

Another complication. Now tokens. 

Now diffusion. I find grace

In October’s devotion. 

 

I had not known the chalk of hubris 

and patience of (or for) (or towards)

a world without end were instruments 

set to the same metronomical

Rhythms. On this run I try to keep

The water in sight the whole go.

Bleached birds wax off in flight

As I loop ponds, curve the peninsula

As everything levels out. I find grace

In the concrete heat carolina summer

And the grackle’s croak.

 

I can curse only in half-words or

Hyphenated pieces striking matches

On fine-toothed sandpaper. I strike light

In the place where all that has been lost

Is buoyed. I find grace in the dark. 

 

My guilty pleasure is that I do treat my work like a time capsule of sorts. I am grateful for the way poetry allows me to record life. Having read so many new poets and forms of writing poetry this semester, it is interesting to see how my work has evolved and what has remained consistent. I am thinking more about form and structure than I have in the past, thinking about refrains and language that allows me to more forward.

Working in the twenty-first century, I often think of the sheer volume of how much information is accessible to me—how nearly anything in the world that I could wish to know is available to me within minutes, often mere seconds. Then, the consideration of what to do with this knowledge and immense privilege, because there’s no refuting (at least for me, and as much as the digital world can be suffocating) that that’s what it is. In my writing I seek a way of understanding the world, which is by no means an original or an uncommon approach to poetry, but I do think this statement permeates more in the poetry of the twenty-first century. Since there are infinite ways of knowing and being known, I think it is the role of the poet in contemporary American culture to articulate this fact for the individual, and the abundance and accessibility of writing in our era allows for collectives to emerge from this infinite body of work and knowledge.

You know, at the core of everything, I think poetry comes down to faith. And I don’t necessarily mean like some great all-knowing capital lettered being (but that can be part of it, sure and absolutely), but the faith that comes by virtue of being a person. Rejoicing in the moments where we see its strength plain and clear and winnowing our way towards it when we falter. This is most clear to me in language and more recently, running. The poem I’ve included here is something I wrote recently trying to reckon with some of these things. It’s still a work in progress.

One Response to The Great Weight of the World!

  1. Prof VZ November 20, 2024 at 3:39 pm #

    Thanks for sharing this poem! I like how it functions as a sort of ars poetics (both in poetic form and in prose) as you reflect on how your poetics is also a poetics of living, a way of bringing value and understanding to life. I also like how the poem is tied to rhythms of running–how running and poetry sort of merge in lines like this:

    patience of (or for) (or towards)

    a world without end were instruments

    set to the same metronomical

    Rhythms.

    Both activities can have a sort of sense of loss of self in the midst of it, where something different (more formal?) takes over.

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