Expectation is what most delivers us
from happiness, knowing everything
could be taken away. Why do we linger
outside the palm reader shop, consider
the one marble eye of the future? Why do
we look for the devil in coffee grounds?
Some muddled shape as preamble to
our own drowning. How difficult it is
to be a bad omen, to say it won’t be okay:
arriving only as envoy for bad tidings.
But it is also hard to be a good omen—
to stand on the other side of a rising river
with the shape of the word boat in your mouth.
Language is the blade by which we puncture
the future, its terse hide. Language is the blade
by which we interrogate the liver, diagram
its prophecy. Or maybe it is more like
an oar, bending, bending to the body of water.
There is no way to get what we want,
but there used to be. Long before we carved
letters out of stone and time, our throats
were longing for the sake of longing,
and the rain dropped at our feet without
asking—for we had no speech—
and we had no future to be afraid of.
–
Brendan Bense is a poet and UC Irvine MFA candidate whose work can be found in Columbia Journal, The Crab Orchard Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Before joining the cohort at UCI, he worked as a writer and editor in New York and Philadelphia.