Carcanet Poetry

This is why we search for love.
We search for it all of our lives,
even after we find it.

Outside the car, the cows and pastures are drifting away;
they look calm, but calm is not the truth.
Despair is the truth. This is what
mother and father know. All hope is lost.

And yet, more often we were silent, preferring
the river over anything we could say—

wind is in our ears,

that is what we hear—

And then we are simply falling—

And the world goes by,

As they fall away, perhaps you will attain

that enviable emptiness into which

all things flow, like the empty cup in the Daodejing

10

I could hear the clock ticking,

presumably alluding to the passage of time

while in fact annulling it.

All too soon I emerged

my true self,

robust but sour,

like an alarm clock.

Life, my sister said,

is like a torch passed now

from the body to the mind.

Sadly, she went on, the mind is not

there to receive it.

How heavy my mind is,

filled with the past.

Is there enough room

for the world to penetrate?

It must go somewhere,

it cannot simply sit on the surface—