Out Here

What do you want out here, I hear the night ask when I step out for something I can’t name but let’s call cool air. Then the night showed me faces in places I choose not to remember in spite of medication and mental health guidance. Some doors I keep closed for everyone’s sake. Yet I love to watch the garden at the end of day and hear the evening birds gather in the maples where I can take the whole world in, shadows lengthening until they change one more time into night.

                                        Or there could be a car wreck of memory come back like they do, barging through all barriers with no forgiveness. Listen, it’s not complicated; you are accountable for every single time you pulled the trigger, or even helped light someone up. You have to strap that on; there’s no other way, the need-fires always burning in the distance, and the long-awaited screams finally arriving among us all. The wound, Rumi said, is the place where the light enters.

 

 

 

 

Bruce Weigl’s most recent poetry collection, On the Shores of Welcome Home, won the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry and will be published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in the fall of 2019. The Abundance of Nothing (TriQuarterly Books) was one of three finalists for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His memoir, The Circle of Hanh, was published by Grove Press in 2000. He has published more than twenty-five other works of poetry, essays, and translations from the Vietnamese and the Romanian. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio, and Ha Noi, Viet Nam.

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