In the Space Between

Lots of poems get written about moments that take our breath away. Now and then a poem invites us to take a breath.

Photo by Kaitlan Balsam on Unsplash

Over the past several years, we have found ourselves — individually and collectively — battered by events. (That’s as gently as I can put it.) As one result, I’ve found myself increasingly aware of the random moments of quiet that sometimes overtake me between one event and the next.

---

>"It is a moment in which nothing is happening"<


It is a moment in which nothing is happening,
when the restless earth beneath my city
lies quiet, when cool winter air
taps my cheek, while above in silent piles of gray
the sky collects tomorrow’s rain. Nothing is happening
except the beat of my shoes on the pavement,
except the ordered dance of traffic at a four-way stop,
except the modest thoughtful billows of the flag
above a building down the block. Nothing
is happening in this fortunate Here and Now, 
no deaths, no tremors, no uprootings, nothing 
but patient movement, fleeting grace of gratitude
for the unearned blessing of a moment like this
when nothing is happening except the moment itself.

---

BIRD UNIVERSITY


My student days were long ago
and elsewhere; I do not know
this campus, I have come here now
not for a class but for a clinic,
a crash course in resistance, a shot in the arm
to educate my body’s frail resolve –-

if I can find the place. I wander paths 
through random spaces angled in between 
tall pedantic buildings, Life Science, 	
Administration, I pass the library 
and cross a green quad, feeling the absence
of student bodies, their solid urgent thrust
shouldering down sidewalks, into classrooms,
or sprawled on benches, calling to each other

across the grass. Aware, each further step I take
into this absence, that it is not empty –- 
in every tree and bush, wings flick like shadows
at the edge of eyesight, voices too flyaway  
to echo off these learned looming walls
call to each other, blithe, clamorous as freshmen:

	Hey, c’mere.
	Hey, c’mere.
	Omigod I’m late.
	Omigod I’m late.
	Hey, c’mere.
	I’ll text you.
	I’ll text you.
	Omigod I’m late.
	Hey, c’mere.

Their songs flutter across the cool spring air,
follow me down the path between Creative Arts 
and Business, my thoughts now less of absence 
and more of life, of lives -– some interrupted,  
some flitting past unhindered, unobserved, 
indifferent to observation. I am crossing
this campus because I love the life I have, the life
these absent students have, I hope this rumored clinic, 
once I find it, can finally inject me safe
against one cruelest interruption, can inject students
back into this campus, fill the quad again
with their no-longer-interrupted days –- 
I want that, for me, for them. And yet

with every step along an empty path
through cool and singing air, I realize:
I want this too, this ancient new curriculum
of space and quiet. Do not inoculate me
against birdsong, combine it somehow 
into the cure, into the syllabus; give tenure to 
these small winged lecturers, open the windows
of all these tall pedantic buildings and listen 
as flyaway voices rise without echo 
from all the spaces angled in between. 

        I’ll text you.
	I’ll text you.
        Omigod I’m late.
	Hey, c’mere.

---

[You can listen to an audio version of these poems using the little widget above the photograph.]

“It is a moment in which nothing is happening” was written toward the start of 2019 … when we were all feeling fairly battered already, and had no idea how much the battering would intensify. The poem describes the improbable peace and simplicity of the world I walked through one February day on the way from my office to a restaurant for lunch — away temporarily from the sometimes irrational demands of my job, away temporarily from the appalling news stories and apocalyptic reactions on the internet. (No smartphone, blessed be, so the internet couldn’t come with me to lunch.) Everything I’d left back at my desk was real … and so was every ordinary, quiet thing I could see and hear as I walked down the sidewalk. Holding those two realities in my mind and body made for a surreal sort of lunch hour.

“Bird University” is about another walk I took in the spring of 2021, on my way to get my very first shot of COVID vaccine. It had been an … eventful two years; those of us who had survived had had our lives turned outside in. Things were starting, we hoped, to get better. An achingly empty university campus didn’t initially seem to show signs of hope, but as I walked across it I found myself surrounded by signs of life … and seized by a longing to hold on to some of the quiet that had been enforced on us for so many months, just enough to give everyone a chance to hear what I was hearing, to remember how many other creatures were carrying on their lives around us.

In this moment, in the next moment, in the whisper of space between, life happens. Awareness happens. Choices happen. Breath happens. Sometimes a poem happens, to help us remember what in the world was going on and what it was like to walk through it.