Who Can Govern Themselves Out of Governance?
if I could be somewhere
I wasn’t I would be there
or I would have already
paid that place some
cold and charitable visit.
if you knew how wealthy
I wasn’t you would run.
I cannot remember
what I was before I tried
to become what I thought
I could in light of the
dark that swallowed me.
the story of how I thought
I had not been pure and
had not been enough. how
I was not there though I
had been but was gone
after what I did not
know I did not need
came. how do you fix
that which the house
has no tools to fix?
where is the resolve as
bright as the wet face
of a child, the sight of the
rigid origin of the break?
Copyright © 2023 by A. H. Jerriod Avant. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 13, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Home, mobility, and the revision of life are the tracks my thinking traveled down when I went and thought of making this poem. That whole ‘being in two places at one time’ thing . . . that ‘gettin’ out of one’s own way’ thing . . . self-perception and that of others once we make it out into the larger world . . . that ‘puttin’ on face for work’ thing . . . The way these internal motivations manifest externally, revolving and circling our lives in the same way a pack of vultures makes laps in the air above fresh roadkill.”
—A. H. Jerriod Avant