Carl Dennis, “At the Border”

At the border between the past and the future
No sign on a post warns you that your passport
Won’t let you return to your native land
As a citizen, just as a tourist
Who won’t be allowed to fraternize with the locals.

No guard steps out of a booth to explain
You can’t bring gifts back, however modest,
Can’t even pass a note to a few friends

That suggests what worries of theirs are misguided,
What expectations too ambitious.

Are you sure you’re ready to leave,
To cross the bridge that begins
Under a clear sky and ends in fog?
But look, you’ve started across already
And it’s one-lane wide, with no room for U-turns.

No time even to pause as drivers behind you
Lean on their horns, those who’ve convinced themselves
Their home awaits them on the other side.

From Unknown Friends. Carl Dennis will be reading with Henri Cole tonight at Housing Works Café in an event sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. As he explained to a reader during an online Q&A, “Poetry is useful in that it allows readers to feel that they are not alone, that others have thought and felt as they have. It can do this more powerfully than any other kind of writing, or at least more directly, because in a good poem we are made to feel that we are in the presence of a whole human being speaking to us directly, or providing a script for us to enter as we see fit.”

17 April 2007 | poetry |