string theory — Blackbird Archive

← v8n2, Fall 2009

it is true that “to be” is a very weak verb, even though

it is true there were raspberries in the refrigerator.

it is true there were mice in the closet, and in the rice.

it is true that “to be” cannot mean to mean more than it is

and to be as much is to be beyond—what, is it true?

i have been thinking about how nothing has happened

the way we remember it happening, and how what we

remember, is only ours. you never said yes in the way

i remember. your hands did not mean what i thought, either.

i thought not one thing your hands have agreed to remember.

you’re so absent—from me. is this

what you meant in the thai restaurant in boston—

how you break off with someone—the bird calls.

the bird calls. the bird calls. the bird calls, and nothing answers.

nothing calls for the bird. so the bird goes away.

identity love science

Ruth Ellen Kocher

Ruth Ellen Kocher’s books include One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press, 2003); When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering (New Issues Press, 2001), which won the Green Rose Prize in Poetry; and Desdemona’s Fire (Lotus Press, 1999), which won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Her work has been published in Callaloo , Cimarron Review , Ploughshares , African American Review , The Gettysburg Review , The Missouri Review , Washington Square , Crab Orchard Review , and Ninth Letter , among other literary journals. Her work has been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She’r . She has been a fellow at the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, the Cave Canem Workshop, and Yaddo. She teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.