I never wanted to go back into the trailer park,
not for a night, not for an hour. Summer heat
was stifling—no trees, just dust and gravel,
someone drunk, yelling. A sage grass field on
the other side of a fence called me—I’d go there
to build forts, hideouts, what I now can see as
a makeshift house. It sounds tragic, a sad metaphor
of days to come, but a child is without context,
unable to comprehend coping mechanisms—he’s
just surviving, lying on his stomach, peering out
like a sniper, like the man he’ll grow to become
who sets up vantage points from which to surveil
everything. Even now, I get lost in the present
tense. I’m in the bottomlands. I’m outside a bar.
I’m left with people I don’t know. I’m spreading
feed to chickens. I race through leafy green stalks
of corn towering over me. Am I lost, found, child,
man, minotaur, metaphor, parable, prayer? I could
be anything, anyone. I could have ceased and almost
did again and again, but I never put it together I’d
been cast aside, never thought about whether I was
stone or stream or shadow passing over a murky
depth. I never thought misery a worthy subject.
I never wanted a poetics based upon what someone
overlooked or failed to account for, what doesn’t
rattle another’s bones or bend their brains. I never
wanted a purity test others were doomed to fail.
A poem is a makeshift construction on the edge
of town. A poem is the present tense filling, filling
with past, future, eternity, distance, light, words,
wind, everyone. A poem is a home I build and build,
this invitation—open, waiting. It is full of rooms.
Asked for my identity, the word makes me
squeamish—I’d rather follow a lone bird’s
call through the woods and lose myself.
I would rather move a few paces out into
silence, imagining eternity. Can that be
identity—being led not knowing where,
how far or how long? I try to push myself
beyond my boundaries. I try to be someone
whose thoughts are more expansive. Maybe
I’ve said that elsewhere, in another time,
in another useless version of who I’ve been.
I used to sit beside an invalid. She made up
songs whose sounds still roam inside me.
I search always not finding them. I used
to hide in the barn loft. Later: a magnolia.
Then: libraries, coffee shops, all-night diners,
back patios. Now a sunroom. Some days I
live an hour along a roadside ditch, pulling
silks from honeysuckles, tasting nectar. I’ve
disappeared so many times only to reappear.
Each premise I posit prompts more and more
premises, each becoming an infinity, just as
each moment, as a portion of time, predicts
and eclipses every other moment, infinitely
infolding and enfolding so that a narrative
can’t be one thing only, not even a thousand,
but as many versions as minds exist, mine
and everyone else’s, each like an inlet along
a coastline, each like a separate beach, like
grains of sand, or like atoms that make up
the grains of sand which, if measured, would
be a length unable to fit inside the universe.
I can’t make all the words I know fit inside
the one word I don’t know, the one I can’t
find. Isn’t everyone hiding from everyone
else—each face concealing another, another?
So far, the thing I set out to say has become
something else entirely, and isn’t that also
what identity is, since the more one knows
about who one is, the less one knows about
where one is headed, or from where one has
come, or how one is known by others. That which
is observed is changed, altered completely, by
the observer who, likewise, has been replaced
innumerable times, so that we have to wonder
what the mind truly is—a self, a wonder, this
word, or that word? Farther out in my imaginings,
a pure note hangs above a stream, along a reed,
in the flash of a dragonfly’s wing, a sound that is
the source of all sound toward which I am drawn.
I go to make my peace. I do not plan to speak.
All I want to do is hold people near,
smother them in affection and gratitude
that any of us came to exist, here together,
now, another hour, a day or a thousand
weeks—none of which I comprehend—
sometimes I want to leap and shout, run
around a room, embrace at random, stare
into each person’s eyes, laugh, lean against,
weep if necessary, grow quiet, offer consolation,
hold hands and sway, abandon the self, aspire
beyond our present pursuits. I figure one day
I won’t be trusted anymore to venture into
public. “Look at you,” I’ll say, “You’re
a miracle of existence,” and the cashier will
stand there offering a receipt, unsure how
to respond. Waiting in line for coffee one time,
I stood with a man whose black skin was so
clear I had the sense that I was falling into
its depths, deeper and deeper. Onyx—that’s
the word that came to mind, though I was
unsure it held enough meaning to mean what
his presence could possibly say in that or any
moment. Later I searched the word’s possibilities.
A protection stone, easily scratched, mentioned
seven times in Genesis, set in the breastplates
of Jewish priests. Cryptocrystalline—a structure
visible only when magnified, so now I want
every cell of him larger and larger, everyone
beholding, awestruck, reverent, brought to account.
I want everyone magnified: fingerprint whorls,
wrist veins, cheekbones, kneecaps, pupils not
4 mm in diameter but 85, 100, vaster, higher,
wider, my eyes, anyone’s eyes, taking in what
stuns the light, illumination directed deeper
and farther into our own expanses still expanding
as we look upon each other. All I want is to see
what I can’t see, know what I can’t know, touch
what lies beyond the last conception of what
lies beyond each moment’s conception of itself.
Who are we, really, that we are mindful, that we
walk among each other’s presence, peering in?
A number is called, and one more steps forward.
The line gets shorter and shorter, our time together
receding, unspoken, leading elsewhere, lost forever.
Why do we hold back? Why do we wait? Even now
I’m in an all-out sprint toward anyone. I’m gaining
speed. Stand where you are or run toward me too.
I’ll meet you in the air. We’ll be caught up and risen.
Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, and No Other Kind of World. His work has received the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in The Hudson Review, Southern Review, Image, The Laurel Review, The Inflectionist Review, Potomac Review, and others. His eighth book Coming into an Inheritance, is forthcoming. He lives and teaches in Tennessee.
