Alarmed, today is a new dawn,
and that affair recurs daily like clockwork,
undone at dusk, when a new restaurant
emerges in the malnourished night.

We said it would be this way, once this became
the way it was. So in a way we were

waiting for it. I still haven't eaten, says the cook
in the kitchen. A compliant complaint.

I never eat, says the slender diner. It's slander,
and she's scared, like a bully pushing

lettuce around. The cook can't look, blind with hunger
and anger. I told a waiter to wait

for me and I haven't seen him since. O it has been forty
minutes it has been forty years.

Late is a synonym for dead which is a euphemism
for ever. Ever is a double-edged word,

at once itself and its own opposite: always
and always some other time.

In the category of cleave, then. To cut and to cling to,
somewhat mournfully.

That C won't let leave alone. Even so, forever's
now's never, and remember is just

the future occluded or dreaming. The day has come:
a dusty gust of disgusting August,

functioning as a people-mover. Maybe we're going
nowhere, but wherever I go

I see us everywhere. On occasions of fancyness,
or out to eat. As if people, stark, now-ish

people themselves were the forever of nothing,
the everything of nobody,

the very same self of us all, after all, at long
last the first.


About this poem
"My 3-year-old daughter likes saying, 'Never ever!' and for the first time I really thought about this funny construction: So there's an 'ever' after the finality of 'never'? There's more time to be found? I like words that contain their own opposites, like 'ever' and 'cleave,' and also by the way certain concepts, like 'change,' can also challenge themselves, or at least add a pinch of doubt. 'Change' can mean 'substitution' rather than 'transformation' (same person into another outfit or same amount, just quarters now instead of bills) or 'the more things change, the more they stay the same.' But over time, right before my eyes, there are irreversible changes that have never occurred before-where it seems possible to grow, not just rearrange, to break patterns, not just replace. My kid outgrows a mispronunciation (she used to call them 'opposips') or we enter a new year; it may not be news, but it is a new chance. We can't go back to the old. But will we make this new year worthy of its promise of true change or will we just go around in circles?"
-Brenda Shaughnessy

About Brenda Shaughnessy
Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of "Our Andromeda" (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). She teaches at Rutgers University-Newark in New Jersey.


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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Brenda Shaughnessy. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate