On the Nature of things

Of love I am slowly becoming
more aware. When love manifests from exactly
where it has always been
it fills in my head like a gold crayon.
Lucretius knew love to be suspect.
Given a potion for it it nearly killed him.
And in rare moments of lucidity for his remaining life
he railed against love, working endlessly
on his six-volume didactic poem
on Epicurean physics,
the nature of existence
and the condition of making the lover
into a godlike power
before he committed suicide.
And for this we consider love’s therapy.

Love comes like a wave
but unmoving. It smacks upon the ground
in froths of salt and sand, says You
and disappears.

One shivers then.
Love makes you more susceptible to wind.
Of the erotic, forget what you know.
For love leaps along, the unremembered part of the dream.

Love is not memory, it is despite memory.

Who I am? The word nothing
always comes to mind.
Dwindling to the great phenomenological drama.

Nothing? I am nothing? Say that into the mirror
for as many times as it will take
to be onto something.
We go to mirrors to see what nothing manifests as.
Only to find we’re still there.
As if cleaned of all misunderstanding of stillness
by its lemon and metal and light
so slow you can barely tell it is happening.

One thinks: I’m ashamed to be alive.
But so what. Even God is a humiliated god!
Dismembered in the moonlight
and pasted back together in the morning
into reason, a word, like he never was.

We cannot even fully recall the circumstances
of our own lifetime, and its liars, its lying in the wave
any more than we can recall who that god of mirrors was,
written to on a wealthy woman’s bandages of linin
that no one could fully translate.

Where is the lost thing; where is the note
that divided the beginning—where is the manuscript
Walter Benjamin carried on his person
when he, in despair, killed himself at the border of Port Beau,
fleeing Hitler, denied asylum?
The manuscript he’d dragged
through the perilous mountains in a suitcase.
The one his companions called his “burden.”
The one he claimed was more important than his life,
and disappeared with his life.

In the absences of words consciousness grows wild and green and sentient,
a black sunflower pointed at the sun.
A mind searching for its mind.

Maybe that manuscript is being held somewhere
on a velvet pillow in a glass room
beside a cast jade tongue
and a precious ivory pipe with teeth marks on its tip.
Maybe it’s being read by only one man,
over and over again, who weeps every time.
Or, like all matter, it is dissolved,

as all our books one day will—though
the law of conservation of matter says it’s still there!
That something cannot be made into nothing.
And given infinite time it may reconstruct itself,
exactly the way it was, then on and on,
to every known object in existence,
that we’re all changing form
and all will return. I can’t explain the math.
Staring blankly at ourselves everywhere.
Surrounded by flowering weeds and grey waves,
leaning to drink from a mirror
and unable to look away,
committing suicide by ironic gaze.

What if your suicide poem
was the worst thing you’d ever written?
And of course it is: wrenching and hackneyed and tired.
But nothing really ends.
This thing that flops along the kitchen counter
grabbing at the rinds of sourdough and butter
goes on, ambivalent, tortured with thought,
tongued with the angel’s rambling, dissonant chord.

I speak to you now, old lying mind,
in all these short nightmares Valéry called language.
I speak to you
who hides, veiled among the image fires
in a body with hair growing grey upon it

a hand, writing of its hand—I speak from the body,
which hides a child, who is nothing.

Bianca Stone is a Vermont-based poet and scholar currently serving as Vermont's poet laureate. Stone is the author of the poetry collections, What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022) winner of the 2022 Vermont Book Award; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014); The Near and Distant World (Tin House, 2026), and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Carson's translation of Sophocles' Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her poetry and writings have appeared widely in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poets and Writers, The Nation and the Best American Poetry series. In 2013 with her partner the poet, Ben Pease, she co-founded the poetry-based nonprofit, Ruth Stone House, in honor of her grandmother, the late poet, Ruth Stone, where she organizes events and retreats, teaches classes on poetry and poetic study and hosts the Ode & Psyche Podcast.