Tuesday, September 12, 2017

The Endless



The Endless

By Timothy Donnelly

 

I saw a yellow butterfly

flying

in my opinion

the wrong way, flying across

the sound

to Connecticut

 

I saw a cormorant

oily-looking

flying

close to the sea’s surface

precisely

as I floated on it on

 

my back in

the attitude of the crucifixion

minerals in my body

in

conversation with

the minerals of the sea

 

about the sun

how can I possibly

add

to what’s already been said

so well

by the ancients

 

and said with

an austerity I’ll never

know

it is an honor to take

a backseat to the ancients

who knew how

 

I was a fat white fish

dissolving

under the sold-out stadium sun

like a god

but like a god

I could live through anything.



About This Poem

 

“I wrote the first three stanzas of ‘The Endless’ in my head while floating on my back with my eyes closed under the sun over Long Island Sound. I felt invincible. I left the water with the sense that the poem would end up taking off in an eco-theological direction, probably concluding with an indictment of human greed and destructiveness (or something like that). Later that night, when I started typing it up, the poem turned out to have other ambitions for itself, so I stepped out of the way and let it go where it wanted to.”

—Timothy Donnelly


Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010). He is a poetry editor at Boston Review and chair of the writing program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.

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