Read a poem from the new U.S. poet laureate, who is published by local Milkweed Editions
Editor’s Note: In honor of Ada Limon’s new position as U.S. Poet Laureate, and in celebration of Minneapolis-based Milkweed Editions’ publication of her most recent collection, “The Hurting Kind,” we are pleased to share a poem from the summer section of her book.
OPEN WATER
It does no good to trick and weave and lose
the other ghosts, to shove the buried deeper
into the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come,
my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistent
in water I cannot tell if it is a wave or you
moving through. A month before you died
you wrote a letter to old friends saying you swam
with a pod of dolphins in open water, saying goodbye,
but what you told me most about was the eye.
That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish
that passed you during that last-ditch defiant swim.
On the shore, you described the fish as nothing
you’d seen before, a blue gray behemoth moving slowly
and enduringly through its deep fathomless
North Pacific waters. That night, I heard more
about the fish and that eye that anything else.
I don’t know why it has come to me this morning.
Warm rain and landlocked, I don’t deserve the image.
But I keep thinking how something saw you, something
was bearing witness to you out there in the ocean
where you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife,
but you in your original skin, right before you died,
you were beheld, and today in my kitchen with you
now ten years gone, I am so happy for you.
— From “The Hurting Kind” by Ada Limon (Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 2022). Copyright 2022 by Ada Limon. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. Milkweed.org.
