space for a sentence to go on
1
The feeling of many data. So many people.
Got up to flee. Dressed. In several languages. Erased the referents (bombs, rubble, houses on fire).
Uncertainty of singular and plural. And yet absorb. Many data into one individual trauma.
Here feeling is the term for passing from the objective ("crisis") to the subject ("I'm desperate").
2
Hope intermittent. To find a bit of space.
Overrun? Millions stomping in the dark?
Even between 1931 and 1945, quota fulfillment in the US. averaged 17.5 percent.
A bill to allow refugee children failed to pass.
3
In the real world always the "simply given."
Events, not in the sense of "nexus of occasions," but brute fact.
In the US there is more space where nobody is than where somebody is.
Even with a flood from "shithole countries" space to be. Like a lone cowslip in an open field.
4
We say "they." No actual occasion close to our habits of thought.
Do we fear? So many diverse forms of thinking?
Say something in one way. Then in another. Space for a sentence to go on. In a given language.
We, as if we needed nothing but ourselves in order to exist.
5
A stone wall vs. molecules in violent agitation. Shirt torn open.
Asylum. Receding approaching receding.
The way space feels when you are just off the boat.
Not native. So many different realities.
6
A song folds intermittent hope.
A ring around the moon is a sign of rain, some say.
Wide open. Unbearably vast space.
Turned over to the winds.
Rosmarie Waldrop's most recent books are Gap Gardening: Selected Poems, Driven to Abstraction, and Curves to the Apple (New Directions). Her collected essays, Dissonance (if you are interested), is available from University of Alabama Press. Her novel, The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter, has been reissued by Dorothy, a Publishing Project. She has translated from the French 14 volumes of Edmond Jabès's work (see her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Wesleyan UP) as well as books by Emmanuel Hocquard, Jacques Roubaud, and, from the German, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Gerhard Rühm, Ulf Stolterfoht, and Peter Waterhouse. She lives in Providence, RI where, with Keith Waldrop, she edited Burning Deck Press.