Blackbird Archive← v21n1, Spring 2022Poetry · Volume 21, Number 1
When Everything Is Nothing
Often I imagine a shirt, no thread, but I see a shirt.
Without question of having sufficient art or cloth.
But one stitch, and there I go, the shirt
forming before me, and sometimes a month
eclipsed by the design of a pocket or a resolution
to take on some difficult taper I’ve avoided
or let go of patterns I’ve needlessly repeated.
I could say it is perfect. Unfinished. Unstarted.
I hold it and do not hold it, the pure notion
of the collar, lapel, sleeves, and pearl buttons.
Then I am transported, as to a gigantic fish fry.
The shirt that will never be and the shirt
that was and does not remain are the same.
I see it because it is not. Absence requires music.
If there is something to show me nothing,
it is like whistling, I must make it out of air.
