Poetry
you’re still here, you’re gone, now / someone new
By Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Miranda Forrester, Arrival, 2023. Oil and gloss on polycarbonate, 72 x 55 7/8 in. Photo: Deniz Guzel. Courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary
"…the place of a thing is what surrounds that thing." – Carlo Rovelli
no now without then, no there
without here, finally
you glimpse the truth of it:
that we are bound to relation
that we are we inescapably
it’s this that you feel now, here
with the body that came of your body, both replica
and distinct from you in turns –
those eyebrows
that nose
more than the jazz of two beings
a stranger third thing with weight.
oh, good morning
oblivion, good morning unpoemable
otherness, with which you are intimate now
and maybe, because of this, wise. good morning,
you’ve arrived, you’ve left, farewell –
but you’re still here, no you’re gone now
you’ve become someone new.
how to explain in language
how all of this could be true –
to have stepped through the curtain
into that other place –
to find the face in the mirror
is still your own.
–
Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet and writer. Her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, QUIET (2022), won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber in the U.K. and in North America by Knopf.