The pine branches reach-the rain! the sun! the edge of the moving air! three goats!
Girls on razor scooters turn the corner and scoot
Autonomy actually shows, it shines amidst the stars of decision
I sacrifice hearing to writing, I return to the back of the train
Surrounded by nothing but tattered island nasturtia, the shoveler is prepared to exclaim, "Grief exterior, grief prison"
Beastly pine cones are falling from the sky
Down in the middle, and a soft wall, the midnight breeze billows
Check the role, the rock, the rule!
From cardboard pressed to ginger, water spilled on a list, salt sprinkled over...
Why so many references to dogs, purple, and bananas?
Then the carnival-it came up afterwards like a vermillion buttress to say of itself "it appears"
Wren in a ragged bee line, flora sleeping live
Yuki, Felicia, and Maxwell have between them $13.75, and they are hungry as they enter the small cafe, where they see a display of pies and decide to spend all their money on pie there and then-how much pie will each get to eat if each pie costs $5.25?
Invincible is my myopia, great is my waist, choral are my ideas, winged are my eyebrows, deep is my obscurity-who am I?


About this poem
"'Ponderable' is an elegy from my collection titled 'The Unfollowing,' forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2016. Noticing that it is a poem of 14 lines, readers might speculate that it is a sonnet, but a proper sonnet is structured to facilitate logical thinking and that is precisely what is precluded when one is confronted by death: There is no coming to terms with it."
-Lyn Hejinian

About Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian is the author of "The Book of a Thousand Eyes" (Omnidawn Publishing, 2012). She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and lives in Berkeley.

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(c) 2015 Lyn Hejinian. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate