…
The dead wake for nothing.
Or wake & nothing
is still there.

The wide meadow. Deep grass.
Distant ships.
The far fires

Only glimpsed
from a distance.
Nothing looks back,

blinks twice.
…
(Kevin Young, from “Usher”)

That “blinks twice” produced a red-letter reading moment for me, a laugh of surprised delight and recognition. Recognition of what? I ask myself. I suppose it’s recognition of a conceit, an old word, I think, in the poetry vineyard. It turns on the term “nothing,” a workaday word if ever there was one, repeated 3 times in an increasingly interesting way. When it’s still there, fair enough; when it looks back, wait a minute! When it blinks twice, the full punch is delivered.

Spooky and delicious. Rather than a container of absence, “nothing” is turned into a presence, perhaps even ominous and aggressive. I think of the Canadian forest fires “blinking” at us. The mega-nothing which they imply encroaches.

The entire poem, with others of Kevin Young’s, is published in Poetry, July/August 2023.

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