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They Have Vanished, the Things of This World
1
The World is made of events, not things. Carlo Rovelli tells me. He is making it strange, but I still don't see it with fresh eyes. Not here in this Northern country. Where I am talking fast because the sun is setting. No need to cry: come, wind. The Towers have long fallen.
2
Is my cat an event? Monotonous enough to let me stroke her? I recall barrel organs I could not pass without breaking into dance. But they, the barrel organs, were cranked in my long gone German childhood. I can't hear even the ghost of an echo. Now that only weather's out there: wind, rain dropping from the sky.
3
The cat then a knot, a vibration. Immobile within her fur, sucked into nothing. What of the burst of sun she crossed? From the left and from the right? Facts about cats, you say, are to be taken with a grain of salt. Just think the wind: mere motion of air.
4
And quantum fields no more than codes. Of a language that can speak to absence? To death gathered against my teeth? For I am far advanced, say ninety proof. Yet still look out of my face. For horizons filled with azure rather than wind carrying the smell of rain.
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Rosmarie Waldrop has authored over 20 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. Her poetry collections include The Nick of Time (2021), Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (2017), Driven to Abstraction (2010), Curves to the Apple (2006), and Blindsight (2003), all from New Directions. Her collected essays, Dissonance (if you are interested), is available from University of Alabama Press. She has translated 14 volumes of Edmond Jabès’s work (see her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Wesleyan UP) as well as volumes by Emmanuel Hocquard, Jacques Roubaud, and, from the German, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Peter Waterhouse, and Gerhard Rühm. She lives in Providence, RI where, with Keith Waldrop, she edited Burning Deck Press. In 2006 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her other awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award.