On Nothing

The problem is the dissection problem.
One lays open the heart and slippery lungs
and is grieved forever for a small mottled frog.
Is it too much or too little love for the world
that moves one to despair in this life about
the despair of nothing after life, which this
life briefly — badly — interrupts?
It is true, nothing is unfamiliar to us,
accustomed as we are to linoleum, wool snoods,
hands in pockets feeling the working hip bone.
But nothing is not despair, nor dark, nor pain;
it is none of these, and that is the point.
So if driven by fear of nothing, despair
is a simple mistake, a bit of a joke.
And what a waste of the gaping something to think
that because it is over soon, it is a groaning
effort to haul the sun each morning, to scurry
around a pyramid of footstools, improbable beings
frantic as mimes to prop up marvels that wobble
toward drains or manholes.
And too, it's unclear that eternity
has claim to meaning, or that if we had longer —
forever say — we could do better than we do
at five in a wagon, at eighty brushing the hair
from the forehead of a new youth.
Eternity seems an unlikely place to look
for more. Those twin prongs of before and after
seem merely to hold the middle ground like skewers
on summer corn so we may bring it tidily to our lips.
In fact, we don't know that there is nothing.
All that we are and all that we aren't — it's not that.
The process of oceans grinding shells to sand
and sucking it back for bottom dwellers —
it's not even that. Zero is our invention,
an idea for which there is no evidence.
The great metaphor of empty space is false,
full of red suns rising in every direction.
A vacuum is light. A leg severed is memory.
A child unborn is regret or relief.
An accident avoided is a picnic by the road
with Dairy Queen burgers in thin tissue wrappings.
Except that we think of it, and on occasion,
groping for a nameless quarter, will feel the pull
of a thing beyond reckoning. But to think of it,
even to name it nameless means: that is not what we face.
Either our minds are famously unreliable
and we should get on with folding napkins and sheets
steaming from the iron, or our thoughts are not aliens,
rather emitted from nature like shad-roe, oxides,
uranium and burls. If so, these conceptual visions
of nothing, at which we excel, are pictures
of home, to be admired more stringently.

—first published in The Hudson Review,1989, and selected
by Jorie Graham for Best American Poetry, 1990