"You will outlive yourself . . ."

Big Frank shares below a great poem by Timothy Donnelly from his latest collection of poems: "The Cloud Corporation". And no, it's not just because the title has "Cloud" in it that Big Frank recommends the book. The poems are sharp, they tread familiar territory but reveal it in startlingly pleasing ways. Here's one that Big Frank especially likes on the transitoriness of feeling, but unlike much lyric poetry this is presented as a good thing - not a loss. There are times when we feel we would bet large on the permanence of what we feel; as Donnelly puts it: "You wager too much, small self, on the way you feel." For, as the poem concludes: "you will outlive/ yourself again, and what you feel now, this adamantine/ sorrow, will scatter its dicethrow behind you into swans." Yes that wager that you were so sure of . . . the dicethrow turns into swans!

THROUGH THE WILDERNESS OF HIS FOREHEAD
By Timothy Donnelly

You wager too much, small self, on the way you feel. Nothing
you have thought should last forever can’t be lost.

Even the yellow wind that begins at once to strip the last of the
heart-shaped foliage from the tree across the way

knows that feeling is a spell from which the mind can
rouse itself awake if it would only let itself be taken

leaf by leaf apart. And you have felt this fear before, clung
as to a vapor misremembering what had stood to

live through memory alone. Or was it afterwards among
fog folded into blankets of some self-erasing sleep.

Or when, conversely, focused on the constancy of any given
thing without dispersing, undissolved – an icecap-

white moon or clock-face on a tower – the mind intent on far
too fine a point to take in any more. You will outlive

yourself again, and what you feel now, this adamantine
sorrow, will scatter its dicethrow behind you into swans.