What Is
or is true as
Happiness
Birth
A pure river
Conditions for the equal good
to be as wise and fortunate
at the start
Lost in the pursuit
Under a white oak
two children sitting back
to back on a plank swing, calling
The hand
that touches the earth
to witness
Presses the metal latch, opens
the screen door out from home
sunlight, pond water silence
damselfly at rest on a frond
Having come with you
this far into the drafty air
Copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey Yang. Used with permission of the author.
“George Oppen’s poem ‘A Theological Definition’ has stayed with me for many years. The center of that poem—its question and statement—forms the title plus opening of this poem, and so this poem sets out as an extension of the other, written in response to it, to its worldly theology and mystery, but also continues as a response to a certain experience of, and questioning of, that happiness in the present, and the consciousness that radiates around this experience in words. Words that manifest the poem’s existence through an act of faith, however transitory the world feels.”
—Jeffrey Yang
Jeffrey Yang
Jeffrey Yang is the author of Line and Light (Graywolf Press, 2022); Hey, Marfa (Graywolf Press, 2018); Vanishing-Line (Graywolf Press, 2011); and An Aquarium (Graywolf Press, 2008).