By Carolyn Oliver
I saw eternity the other night
like a great ring of pure and endless light
all calm, as it was bright
and round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years.
Henry Vaughan, from “The World”
Without me my child remembers
the dead boy, whose face I know
only in any other child’s face
as I without my child remember
a murdered girl, a twentieth-century
girl, her face still bright
as the new coin she lent me to call
home. It was winter, yesterday.
Alone and dressed in foolish white,
I saw eternity the other night
and its face was a blank processional
rounding into every room
furnished with absence,
every room missing a face,
and the faces, missing, circling
one smooth unlikeness as hematite
beads embrace a coil of dead hair sliced
from another century. Undreaming,
I watched each name become a satellite
like a great ring of pure and endless light
no body in the world could touch.
In the passing spell (an interval
absolute, unreal) made speechless, I offered
the child’s mother a box of pennies,
an empty mourning brooch
to the mother’s only child. And still—despite
my ceremonies—the mirror spun round
again. Snow remembered to cover
the face of earth—all, from this height,
all calm, as it was bright
on every deathday morning.
Alone we twist risk into knots.
Winter forgets our faces, names,
our brave bridal instants toppled
into permanence by a clock
with childish hands, bullet-studded gears.
Today, as ever, the next cold century begins.
How do I teach you to love this, our last
world? This storm that never clears
and round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years.
Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize), and three chapbooks. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Image, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, Prelude, Consequence, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts. Visit Oliver’s Instagram here, or her website at carolynoliver.net.
