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| JOEL TOLEDO |
| We Have Such Solid Measures for Pain |
| THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS POEM. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. |
| THIS IS PART OF THE LITERATURA READING SERIES | CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO LITERATURA |
| Now I desire no more from poetry
but true feeling. —Derek Walcott Exact is not the word; the hurting is felt in many places. Consider the stars and their distant stabilities. We had made sense of their positions long before science understood their symmetry, long before the world was round. The way they traverse the sky must mean something important, we say. Such slowness, such deliberateness, such weight. The SkyLab fell in 1979, wounding the world somewhere far from what is significant: wood and its natural hardness, the difficult carvings, the impressions, welts on skin. A father testing the firmness of a branch. Evening falls with its steady constellations, its heavy meanings. But we are just too far, too scattered. Proximity makes more sense-- the way the waxing moon threatens the tides, sharpens the long, twisted fingers of trees. The way grains of salt seem to open the skin even before one kneels on them. There is nothing to fear in the abstract, in fact. UFOs, The Big Bang, the pull of black holes, event horizons. The Moon Landing, live via satellite. A comet blazing past, wish-heavy, posing no danger. Orion's belt, remote and unused. Why not something more solid? A buckle glinting in the half-dark, its erratic arc slicing the atmosphere, the orbit of pain, all the aching stretches of the universe, and the child’s body yielding upon impact. This poem is part of the collection that won First Prize for Poetry in the 2005 Palanca Awards |