Rob Baker’s Reviews > The Asking: New and Selected Poems > Status Update

The Perfection of Loss

Like a native speaker
returned
after long exile,
quiet now in two tongues.

"Wrong solitude vinegars the soul,
right solitude oils it" (224)

(from "Vinegar and Oil")

"Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.
Mysteriously, they left.
As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,
who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.
It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that,
only a stepping back from the petty" (214).

"Only then, without you, are we able to see you completely,
lie those wandering monks
who, calling nowhere home, are everywhere home" (198).

(From "To Speech: An Assay")

I've read and enjoyed this poem before...didn't know it was by this author!


A Cedary Fragrance

Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water--

Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,

but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.

Hours after the dishes are washed and stacked,
a metal bowl clangs to the floor,
the weight of drying water all that altered...

You have felt it disappearing
from your own capricious heart--
a restlessness enters, the smallest leaning begins,

Already then inevitable, the full collision,
the life you will describe afterwards always as "after"

(from "Balance", 165)