Eric Hoffman


A QUIET PERSISTENCE
In memory of Sean Bonney


1.

The Earth in familiar orbit—
an angel whose face

takes weeks to traverse—
Once the world was ovum,

now a pillaged crypt,
charnel in the alpine's icy rime


2.

All that is real is that which is innate,
radiant in its integral occupancy of space—

Earth's curator renders perfect objects—
The untendered mercies remain


3.

Our common end is cruelty,
cruelty and the humility of want

hinged on unheard words—
We exist too late to be found


4.

“You can do a lot of watching and dying in three hours”—
A bit of my eye went blind,

so Milton died without pain—
Certainly many things are over.

I find myself crazy & ignorant as ever
as this cosmos winds down

some interminable dimestore clock—
“There is a crack in everything”—

So the proverb fits. And yet its opposite—
Its limit stuns


5.

What remains of life dwindles
into the unobtainable—

Experience is itinerant, yet
the insensate encloses us,

unfolds with an uncommon precision—
The baroque predetermined,

the seasons and sun
for ministration and grace alone


6.

From darkness surfaces
mirrors and inscapes,

impermeable oceans
of glittering crystals—

A ‘Quiet Persistence’
indistinguishable from stone—

Sere Earth cloud,
the sun a nervous ray


7.

Silent
as snow

falling
on snow


8.

"The death or sickness of someone
has always spoilt my hours"—

I cannot bear such a departure—
In winter the stones are in season,

the sun is at its disadvantage in the South—
The sky acquires a darker hue,

night brightens and the nerveless birds begin to sing—
Cold birds, their bones in the stratum—


9.

I am still
here I am
still here




Eric Hoffman is the author of several books of poetry, the most recent being This Thin Mean: New Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Presence of Life (Dos Madres, 2018). A revised and expanded edition of Oppen: A Narrative, his biography of George Oppen, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2018.
 
 
 
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