Any month would do. Any day, in fact.
But let’s imagine some midmorning
in early June as the neighborhood’s trees
gather an abundance of light
and a mourning dove coos somewhere unseen
when we, in a moment of abstraction,
forget ourselves among the many pleasures
and extent of life. There’s always
the possibility of never coming back,
an idea the Jains of ancient India
crafted into a shrine I once saw on display.
The small metal box, open on one side,
revealed a person’s simplified figure
rendered, at the back, in reverse silhouette—
a shape of light cut into the dark square.
The miniature body, a placard explained,
was the paradoxical absence of itself.
A portrait of achieved release.
To the eye, however, the body was whatever
lay behind the shrine—a shape of grass,
perhaps, or, in a museum, polished stone.
Just as John Cage’s 4‘33“ was not,
as its first puzzled audience assumed,
a performance of silence but a composition,
in three parts, of the rediscovered world
a piano’s bright silence contains.
Todd Copeland’s poems have appeared in The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lake Effect, Christianity & Literature, and Sugar House Review. A native of Ohio, he lives in Waco, Texas.
