How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone’s face?
—Richard Wilbur, “Advice to a Prophet”
If there are still leaves;
if the leaves are not stirred by memories of what we did or failed to do;
if magnolias still hold their chalices up to the fragile light;
if a maple drops its red blooms after the rain, though there are no shoes to cling to, and no floors to mop;
if willows still sweep their yellow brooms along the streams and canals;
if canals remain when no one remembers their building, or drinks ice tea at a café beside the locks;
if rose canes turn green though no one prunes the winterkill or compares their petals to a beloved’s face or their thorns to her indifference;
if the story continues without the storytellers, days passing and nights falling without calendars or historical records or unexpected resolutions;
if it does not matter whether there is an end, since we feel no grief when astronomers report the implosion of other stars along with the planets that circled them;
if the universe keeps expanding or contracting or whatever physicists now think the universe does with itself, without any concern for whether we understand;
then perhaps we can dream of this place and every place without us, dream of that continuation we will not know or care about, of that abundance.
—
Susanna Lang’s chapbook, Like This, appeared in 2023 (Unsolicited Books), along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books), and she was the 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from December Magazine. Her third full-length collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, appeared in 2017 (Terrapin Books). Her work appears in such publications as The Common, American Life in Poetry, and The Slowdown.
