—Heraclitus (translated by Brooks Haxton)
If the spur-winged plover’s code, unbroken,
makes the night more mysterious
than the moon-streaked ruins, if the song
& its echo could convince you some drama
in ancient Greek is being acted out still,
could it be the dead who fill the stone seats
know more what it means to be alive
than a man who hears, in the evening plaints
of birds, something more than a music
that makes the night as random as any day,
a code that, if broken, could contain enough
pain to make anyone hear Sinatra’s
“In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning”
& know what it means to love an absence
enough to turn it into a presence, one
that isn’t random & never was, that is
enough to turn it into a presence, one
that isn’t random & never was, that is
as sure as the ancient Greek carved
into columns that make, of shadows,
an intricate game they’ve played so long
they can’t lose & so can’t remember
or forget what it means to be alive,
which, whatever else it might be said to be,
is about how loss is a presence with us
from the start, one neither the music
of shore birds nor the elaborate
communion of an orchestra & a voice
mature and full could ever manage to deny.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 4.
George Looney’s books include the recently-released Ode to the Earth in Translation, The Worst May Be Over, which won the Elixir Press Fiction Award, The Itinerate Circus: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020, the Red Mountain Press Poetry Award-winning What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations, and the novel Report from a Place of Burning which was co-winner of The Leapfrog Press Fiction Award. He is the founder of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-founder of the original Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.
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