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A Sense of Empty

This poem explores themes of emptiness, loss of time, and the inability to fully understand or contain concepts like space and history within our minds. It references stealing cereal as a child and compares different feelings of emptiness, from losing track of time to the vast emptiness of space. The poem questions where to draw lines between what is natural and invented, and doubts a single explanation can connect all things in time and space, leaving the reader with a sense of not truly knowing or containing anything.

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92 views1 page

A Sense of Empty

This poem explores themes of emptiness, loss of time, and the inability to fully understand or contain concepts like space and history within our minds. It references stealing cereal as a child and compares different feelings of emptiness, from losing track of time to the vast emptiness of space. The poem questions where to draw lines between what is natural and invented, and doubts a single explanation can connect all things in time and space, leaving the reader with a sense of not truly knowing or containing anything.

Uploaded by

bingkydoodle1012
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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A Sense of Empty

Lynne Potts

Imagine stuffing a planet in your pocket, what you would


find about time or the time you didn’t have a pocket;
also, the vast empty of what we can’t keep in mind

like this morning’s snow, as if it could reflect a sense


of space, lost time, or anything except what’s cobbled
from what happens in fraught moments, like the time

you stole cereal for Emmy from the Benson General Store,
which was also a kind of empty but not what gets
described with equations as space dimensions.

I read a book once that said human history could be told


as a sequence of invented drinks: beer, wine, whiskey, tea,
coffee, and Coke—Coke being the greatest deviation

from nature, but you can’t tell where to draw the line
between natural or what’s made up, like the quark nobody’s
seen with a naked eye or how theft could make sense.

Beer was discovered when barley was left in a vat


catching water, somebody tasting it with that empty-pocket
feeling like a mother in a row of Benson General cereal.

Who can put it all together—the sympathetic, the synthetic,


the analytic, and the peculiar way things evolve in time
and space, the links between drinks, as beer to Coke.

You probably read books, too, and, like me, doubt that
a single morality exists. You know space does, but you’re
not sure where, in the end, it empties, which is what you feel

when you’re off in a winter snow by yourself and you think


you know snow, common as your coat pocket—then it melts
and you realize you’re not sure you know anything at all.

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