The Holding Space of Words Set To Meter

Kim Addonizio's poetic voice moves me. This is a woman who writes like she has been singed by hell's fires and then immediately dipped in  cool waters--she writes with the kind of balance only a woman who is well aware of Newton's Third Law of Propulsion. You know the one? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So Ms Addonizio writes with the fervour of someone who has known the equal and opposite sides of luck, like somebody whose pain breaks inside her every so often like beads from some torn string and reassembles mysteriously once again.  This poem is one of my favourites:

The Numbers

How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans, 

with fears, with the last sentence someone spoke, still trying to finish 

a conversation already over? How many nights were wasted

in not sleeping, how many in sleep—I don’t know

how many hungers there are, how much radiance or salt, how

many times

the world breaks apart, disintegrates to nothing and starts up again

in the course of an ordinary hour. I don’t know how God can bear

seeing everything at once: the falling bodies, the monuments and

burnings,

the lovers pacing the floors of how many locked hearts. I want

to close

my eyes and find a quiet field in fog, a few sheep moving toward

a fence.

I want to count them, I want them to end. I don’t want to wonder

how many people are sitting in restaurants about to close down,

which of them will wander the sidewalks all night

while the pies revolve in the refrigerated dark. How many days

are left of my life, how much does it matter if I manage to say

one true thing about it—how often have I tried, how often

failed and fallen into depression? The field is wet, each grassblade

gleaming with its own particularity, even here, so that I can’t help

asking again, the white sky filling with footprints, bricks,

with mutterings over rosaries, with hands that pass over flames

before covering the eyes. I’m tired, I want to rest now.

I want to kiss the body of my lover, the one mouth, the simple

name 

without a shadow. Let me go. How many prayers

are there tonight, how many of us must stay awake and listen?