Poem-A-Day: The Whole World Is Gone by Jennifer Grotz

February 4, 2014 The Whole World Is Gone by Jennifer Grotz   Driving alone at night, the world's pitch, black velvet  stapled occasionally by red tail lights  on the opposite highway but otherwise mild  panic when the eyes' habitual check  produces nothing at all in the rearview mirror,  a black blank, now nothing exists  but the dotted white lines of the road,  and the car scissors the blackness open  like the mind's path through confusion,  but still no clarity, no arrival, only Pennsylvania darkness, rocks, cliffs, vistas by day that thicken to black. It's  sensual, though, too, and interestingly mental. What  I do alone, loving him in my mind. Trying not to  let imagination win over reality. Hurtling through the night passions so spent become facts one observes. Not tempered, just momentarily out of view by the body that perceives them. Turning that into my prayer: to be deprived.     Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Grotz. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem  "For better or worse, I tend to do a lot of thinking in my poems. But lately I've been trying to pay more attention to when and where I do that thinking, to be attentive to the settings in which meditation takes place. Sometimes the disconnect between the mind and the world is itself revealing, but in 'The Whole World Is Gone,' I think the setting deeply complements, indeed elicits and allows, a certain set of realizations to occur." --Jennifer Grotz Most Recent Book by Grotz The Needle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)  Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.     Jennifer Grotz's most recent book is The Needle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). She teaches creative writing at the University of Rochester and Warren Wilson College.  Related Poems Panels for the Walls by Cedar Sigo Tang by Bruce Cohen  Eating Alone by Li-Young Lee  __________________________ Love reading Poem-A-Day? Help support it today.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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