The Age of Emptiness
I am leaking a fog that curlicues up through the forest’s trees and laces around leaves. What is there to be afraid of that is burning inside my body? What does the wind have to do with anything? I hiccup around rocks, finally sit, not knowing where I begin and the stone ends.
I remember what I was reborn saying: Where is my blood? But there was no one to ask. Initially I was hoping not to be ruptured while I ran from the elastic ocean that tugged its personal waves and shore back and forth, back and forth.
Some birds scatter from thunder in the tree-filled sky. I’m not sure where I’m going but light mentions a wilderness. A hissing surrounds me as if leaves whisper their fondness for trees, as if clouds are reaching out to caress me and yet warn me about something. I believe I had an existence that escaped me once, a wife who loved mirrors and a girl intent on growing new teeth. Now my hands are frothy like music. I cough to remove the remains of something left inside me, having become delicate. Maybe it’s my old life. Inside me I find my regrets, the white surface of the moon, white moths fluttering like eyelids, problems with time. The boy inside me hurries on, blurring with grief and secrets, toward the grass ahead, either to begin or return. I want to leave his grown up body behind.
My daughter once talked in her sleep about a house drowned by rain. Now I want to explain to her how we all become permeable.
I don’t know where to leave what’s left of me, so I splurge onward, passing bushes whose branches don’t sway to accommodate me. I leave no footprints. I can touch nothing. I pass through everything, discovering myself on the other side. The fires inside me, called feelings, are fizzling out. Wind no longer jostles me around. Over the next horizon I see smoke billowing, and I suddenly know where I need to go, a place where the wind sounds like more than crying.
Laurie Blauner is the author of nine books of poetry, five novels, and a book of hybrid non-fiction called I Was One of My Memories. Come Closer, her latest poetry book, was published in 2023 and won the Library of Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander Press. www.laurieblauner.com
