In Celebration

You sit in a chair, touched by nothing, feeling

the old self become the older self, imagining

only the patience of water, the boredom of stone.

You think that silence is the extra page,

you think that nothing is good or bad, not even

the darkness that fills the house while you sit watching

it happen. You’ve seen it happen before. Your friends

move past the window, their faces soiled with regret.

You want to wave but cannot raise your hand.

You sit in a chair. You turn to the nightshade spreading

a poisonous net around the house. You taste

the honey of absence. It is the same wherever

you are, the same if the voice rots before

the body, or the body rots before the voice.

You know that desire leads only to sorrow, that sorrow

leads to achievement which leads to emptiness.

You know that this is different, that this

is the celebration, the only celebration,

that by giving yourself over to nothing,

you shall be healed. You know there is joy in feeling

your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen future,

so you wait, you stare and you wait, and the dust settles

and the miraculous hours of childhood wander in darkness.

Copyright Credit: Mark Strand, “In Celebration” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)