Hannah’s Excess of Emptiness
Hannah’s Excess of Emptiness
Pens enough and the time that dribbles the ball down the court
With everyone showing up, as appointed or on our own.
You poets, musician, mathematicians of correspondence,
The body erotica, the mass, the sheer, the plentiful and the dead.
Roll on where thread is put,
All tapestry and history of tapestry is called, broken, shaped by the mind.
What of it?
Gad fly and fortune teller mocking fame with a thread and thimble.
Pulling on my family. I forgot everything.
All spills out as the colors on the floor,
The diminutive and assertive vying for play time, shelf space, - wall hanging-
A place to sit and sink into dementia, with my mother, with my father,
Alert to a kind of greed for the undoing of things that might reveal an all
In the tiniest kindred cousins of emotions, senses, air
Still swirling around the apocalypse of endings,
The passage of human things to the great forgetting,
Beyond words, beyond community,
Bare collection you left us and loved us like light in glass.
Ephemeral, is it real to bring us face to face,
One here remembering and one with eyes, hands and feet on the far shore,
Planing boards for a raft or shining the belly of a cello
Where notes fall like money on the eyes of birds or brethren
Who have died like the floating bodies in the Ganga of Varanasi.
Floated in the river of time, belly to fishes,
Eyes turning with each stroke to the bright sky,
Who am I and why?
Not what you do, but the space for what you are, Hannah Arendt.
What is the relation between the power of making and the space of being, within us,
Uncertain at the thought of it and the proclivity of emptiness to fill.
Would you prefer to be filled like a shelf or emptied like a devotee,
Long after singing, adjusting to the rise and contours of silence thinking itself space
And so rare to be precious, if ever known,
If ever transformed to deed from sheer potentiality
In a chain of preparation so long that its things sink back with me
Like amnesia, like stratigraphy in the lines of her stone face,
Carved like the Buddha from an excess of emptiness.
By Rolf Stavig
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