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To the Choirmaster

By Paul Hoover Paul Hoover

Art thou not from everlasting,
O Lord my God, my Holy One?
We shall not die.

The rock lives in the desert, solid, taking its time.

The wave lives for an instant, stable in momentum

at the edge of the sea, before it folds away.

Everything that is, lives and has size.

The mole sleeps in a hole of its making,

and the hole also lives; absence is not nothing.

It didn’t desire to be, but now it breathes

and makes a place, for the comfort of the mole.

I am a space taken, and my absence will be shapely

and of a certain age, in the everlasting.

In the fierce evening, on the mild day,

How long shall I be shaken?

(Habakkuk)

Source: Poetry (June 2010).

Biography

Poet, editor, and translator Paul Hoover is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry including, The Novel: A Poem (1991), Totem and Shadow: New & Selected Poems (1999), Winter (Mirror) (2002), Edge and Fold (2006), Sonnet 56 (2009) In Idiom and Earth (En el idioma y en la tierra) (2012), which was translated by María Baranda and published by Conaculta Press in Mexico, and desolation : souvenir (2012). He has also . . .

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