Handfuls
Hua Xi
I toss a handful into the air.
A handful of nonspecific stuff.
What is this that my hands are tossing?
I'm tossing handfuls of snow into the air.
Where am I getting all this snow on a summer's day?
It must come from somewhere inside me.
I'm tossing handfuls of somewhere everywhere, all the way
up into the air, and it's flitting down and amassing
atop the immaculate townships.
Tin roofs. Church steeples. Lines of parked cars.
Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness
as a figure wilts far below and wonders,
How can snow fall without falling in love?
Wherever I go, my furthest thoughts are lightly billowing.
Whatever is buried within me, I keep
pulling out in tufts.
I hope that when I feel cold, you can feel what I feel
but without feeling any cold.
Because I have struggled to do so,
I choose to believe that
not all sadness comes from somewhere.
The sadness that comes from somewhere drifts down
and mixes with the sadness that isn't from anywhere.
All of us are ordinary people. None of us
can escape the difficult nature
of being thrown away
by a warm afternoon in winter.
from the journal THE YALE REVIEW
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I wrote this poem sort of playfully. I wanted to write a poem about nothing at all. I didn't want to explain what I was feeling narratively, I just wanted to describe it. I wrote it on a really hot day.

Hua Xi on "Handfuls"
Color photograph of the children's book in which the letters were found
Abolitionist John Whittier Greenleaf's Letters Found in Charity Shop

"The discovery was made by volunteers at the Gatehouse of Fleet YMCA, in Dumfries and Galloway, after a woman left the books with them. Inside their pages were letters that appear to have come from the prominent abolitionist campaigner. The library at Whittier College in California—named after the poet—has confirmed that they appear to be authentic letters in his handwriting."

via BBC
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What Sparks Poetry:
Lloyd Wallace on Language as Form


"As the poet attempts to bring their past into the present, into the poetic medium, attempting to make it a keepable artifact, we can see it being buried by the world, by outer artifice, just as the past is buried by the present. The key pathos—the beauty—of this poem is that as we see the poet speaking, we also see them disappear. So, to amend a previous statement: yes, the poem is full of evidence that the poet has lived. But it’s also evidence that she is disappearing, too."
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