to the emptiness, and the emptiness remembers, although it is almost gone, displaced not only by sun, but also by the multitude of sun’s kin: displaced by feathers, milk, and rings, by the creviced skin of the rhinoceros (in which dwell, however, splinters of emptiness still), displaced by the courses of fish through the ocean (which allows no emptiness at all, closing swiftly behind the goings of haddocks and sharks), displaced by babies and music and shoes, displaced by mushrooms and cheese and hammers, displaced by a man’s hat floating on a river, an ancient boat preserved in a museum, displaced by tragedy and its actors, by the bad airs of congresses, parliaments, and kremlins, displaced by the seasons shouldering one another aside for their yearly time, with no emptiness at all between them, displaced by the years of a man’s or woman’s life, with no emptiness at all between them if the man or woman is lucky and alive, displaced by loving and sleeping and singing and sitting in the darkness (which is never empty unless those who sit in it are empty), even displaced by punctuation: commas, colons, semicolons, and the fertile silence that lives between the words of every sentence, a silence which is not emptiness at all if anything at all will follow, but is always an absence remembered, needed, absolutely necessary, like the silence that is the central organ of all music—an emptiness in which richness breathes, and rests, to begin again, and does begin again, and again.
Richard Hague is author or editor of 22 volumes, including, with Sherry Cook Stanforth, Riparian: Poetry, Short Prose, and Photographs Inspired by the Ohio River (Dos Madres Press 2019). His poetry collection Continued Cases (Dos Madres Press) appeared in 2023. A member of SAWC (Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative) and WANA (Writers Association of Northern Appalachia), he was 2021-2022 President of the Literary Club of Cincinnati, the oldest continuously operating organization of its kind in the United States.