
Jun 14, 2017
Share:
Image: Grant Slater
Eventually every error is subsumed
in narrative; it’s just how things go.
You will have grown too old
for the haircut before it grows back;
that’s the future perfect tense.
Someone will have awakened moaning
and because there is an audience
will take that moaning as far
as is profitable. There’s no despair
like inattention. Trees conspire
at the back edge of the property
to invent a more empathetic saw
or impenetrable pulp. This
is what they will have done
against despair. If I wave my wand
and only the magnetic are elected,
what can I do with the steel filings
that gather at the tip but twirl them
in my mug until they form
the standard ball-shape
of all hibernating creatures?
When they maximize warmth
is this their thing against despair?
Someone prints every “s” as an “f”
and just glancing at foliage I think
of soil, which will have been true, eventually.
Eventually every error is subsumed
in narrative; it’s just how things go.
Despair becomes recurrent, a body
of water I sit beside, though not
an all-encircling moat. It is liquid
more vernal, some fluid settled
in the lowest region of the zone,
a depression shy to motion, a basin
I arrive at, thinking, this really is despair,
so much broader than it is long.
While we have you...
...we need your help. Confronting the many challenges of COVID-19—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. In Thinking in a Pandemic, we’ve organized the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it. While much remains uncertain, Boston Review’s responsibility to public reason is sure. That’s why you’ll never see a paywall or ads. It also means that we rely on you, our readers, for support. If you like what you read here, pledge your contribution to keep it free for everyone by making a tax-deductible donation.
June 14, 2017