Poetry

(Elisa Gabbert)

Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent. Her recent poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Diagram, Eleven Eleven, Meridian, Pleiades, Typo and Washington Square. A chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine, is available from Kitchen Press. She is also the author, with Kathleen Rooney, of Something Really Wonderful (dancing girl press, 2007) and That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths Books, 2008). Their collaborations can be found in Boston Review, Caketrain, jubilat, No Tell Motel and other journals.

Walks Are Useless III

After reading a bit of Kafka’s diary, I go out

to check the status of this century’s clouds.

If they were meaningless

then, are they less so now?

I sweep my arm through the air, and it leaves

no trace, no neon zee. I seem

continuous. The view from nowhere

says I’m tiny, and stuck

in the approximate present.

It’s not even speaking directly to me.

And then a blind man says,

When you’re blind,

you don’t see black,

you just don’t see.

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