The Specious Present
I stared at the tiny xeroxed faces
we wore like blurry jokes
pinned to our lapels.
Outside, the light raked the dry brown foothills
we slid down on flattened cardboard boxes,
decades ago, out of control, fast,
fast as years.
I still love the California hills,
I still love boxes and the way a word
is a box. It holds things,
flotsam holding flotsam.
Be the void, said the strobe-light disco ball.
The red wine warmed in my hands, it
spilled on my bare feet as I danced
above the San Andreas Fault.
“Cathy,” they called me that night,
and in the reunion’s obsolete blear
I looked a little like a Cathy,
or a Nadia, unrecognizable save for the eyes
and the animal drive to throw herself
into a long line of aerial cartwheels,
propelled forward and upside down
past language into anachronistic light.
Copyright © 2023 by Catherine Barnett. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 22, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Going to a reunion is a layman’s form of time travel, as is writing a poem. Both bring about a vertigo of space-time simultaneities. I wish I could ask you how long the present—this moment, right now—lasts for you. For the speaker of this poem, this little fraction of time lasts forever and is already over; it’s also known as the ‘specious present,’ as described by William James.”
—Catherine Barnett
Catherine Barnett
Catherine Barnett is the author of the collections Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (Graywolf Press, 2024); Human Hours (Graywolf Press, 2018); The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012), which was the recipient of the 2012 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004).