Grove Koger

Featured Contributor Spring/Summer 2021
Poetry

Not

 Not the boxes of photographs of people I never knew, stiff in their shabbiness.
  
 Not summer on the farm I grew up on.
 Not the apples and apricots and plums that weighed down the limbs of the trees of my early childhood.
  
 Not the friends I never saw again, whose faces I lost, whose names became the words of the song I sang myself to sleep with.
  
 Not the preternatural silence of dawn.
 Not the bright night sliding down like the curtain after the first act of the unfolding drama of the rest of your life.
  
 Not the surprise of sex.
 Not your fingers busy at my groin.
 Not the surprise of waking up alone, or of not waking up alone.
 Not love or lust.
  
 Not the things you can’t remember, and not the things you can.
  
 Not coffee roasting before daylight.
 Not the squids fried crisp and hung up in the cruel sun, not yogurt and honey on the terrace or the scorpion dreaming on the plaster wall.
 Not sand so hot you couldn’t walk, and not the cold sea boiling up all the way from Calabria.
 Not the sting of ouzo.
  
 Not year in and year out.
 Not the arguments about none of the things that mattered.
 Not the words we didn’t say.
 Not the sights we didn’t see.
 Not the tree that fell again and again in the forest.
 Not the tears that never fell.
 Not sentiment.
 Not the dust that gathered in the corners of all the rooms of all the houses we never went back to.
  
 Not the peristalsis of thought.
 Not the Cloud of Unknowing.
 Not the First Cause of the Last Four Things.
 Not the parades.
 Not the Bill of Rights or the Hammer and Sickle or “La Marseillaise.”
 Not the Eiffel Tower, not the Académie Française, not the Popular Front.
 Not Unter den Linden.
 Not the Spanish Civil War or the Lincoln Brigade.
  
 Not cold marble.
 Not the Parthenon, not the Tower of Babel, not the Ziggurat of Ur.
 Not the Pyramid of Khufu or the Colossus of Rhodes or the other five wonders of the ancient fucking world.
  
 Not the deliquescence of history or the green putrescence of culture, busy with maggots.
  
 Not the Magellanic Clouds.
 Not cosmic dust afloat beyond Aldebaran.
 Not x-rays escaping the Crab Nebula at 186,282 miles per second.
  
 Not absolute zero.
  
 Not anticipation.
 Not disappointment.
  
 Not the words on the page.
  
 Not the words not on the page.