y = why not hate the sun: it stares
and has no aspirations. why not the snow,
the laziest ocean. or the stream and its obsessions?
or this desk which is so open to anything
that any gift is meaningless. let endings pass
through you: the sun has no airs. it is the stone
of the fruit and the fruit itself. the snow
requires a blanket and provides. the stream
abandons you even as you are seeing it—
yet here it is, never leaving. why try
to document your loss: cast it to the waters;
there is nothing about love that is accidental.
𐫱
Listen
Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet and a Cave Canem fellow. His book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by The New York Times as a best new book of poetry.
About the Poem
“I took Calculus three times. The first time was in high school—I did well, but I began to think maybe nothing mattered anymore, least of all the AP exam. In college, now required to prove I understood the topic, I took Calculus again, and failed the class. And then I took it one last time. I took this failure as a sign. I moved on.
I wrote this poem thinking of how when you control nothing about the terms under which you work or live, or when you feel as if you have no control, anything might be a tangent. Loss can be a tangent, or a river. And I drew it the way I once learned how (though I can’t provide the proof).”