The lacuna

A lacuna is a place where something that once was is now missing. It’s related to the Latin lacus for lake. A lacuna is a pool of unfilled space.

In grad school, I wrote a series of seven poems I called Lacuna. I started with Lacuna 0. Perhaps it’s a bit of a clever title, Lacuna 0, but 25 years on, it doesn’t make me cringe. The poems are about someone missing from my life who I wanted back. He came back, then went missing again.

A friend of mine recently referred to our time in quarantine/lock-down as “the pause.” I like that, but a pause implies that everything will resume as it had before—it’s a rest stop on the road—a quick aside before we get right back to where we were going. We pause for a comma, allowing a breath before continuing.  When startled, we take a pause to catch our breath, and then let it out in relief as all returns to normal. 

As we know, nothing is returning to normal. At a lacuna, we consider our choices; we change direction. 

Lacuna 0.

Pulled through by lack, the unbent light
angles a mathematical rain, minuses saturate

what they cannot coat. Parallel to you, the sheeting
disguises what you took; perpendicular, it reveals

what you left behind--the habit of your form
divided, bridged, framed.

An event horizon beyond which nothing is
seen; the diameter of a collapsed star

collapsed against the blackness of space--a body
with folded effort concentrates
smallness into thickness

leaves behind the presence of gravity holding.

At a lacuna, we feel weight and wait of the void. What’s on the other side of nothing?

Something? Or nowhere?

As an undergraduate I discovered, like many a self-consciously clever undergraduate before me, that no-where and now-here are the same word. And rightfully so.

No where is now here.

I’ve decided to call this time in the corona The Lacuna--the time in which I look into the unfilled space before me and realize I am now here and no where and something needs to go there. Or get got here.

Lacuna i.

This surface pressed against you.
Each boundary feels how I cannot.
Ladder-cut days by

day through blinds dissemble you. I ply each
surface for a residual line that once
formed you here.

The Lacuna is a breakup that happens when distance doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. With so much space between us, we can’t really see each other any more, just six feet of negative space interrupted by a space we need to steer clear of followed by six feet of negative space—a Morse code of social distance and a new cartography. 

Lacuna iv.

A surfeit of direction and you chose one
on a longitude behind the vanishing point.
my effort to see you slides into punctuation
perforating a horizon where I would tear the world.

Plane the earth--draw us symmetrically toward
an immediate surface where I am you are we is
quickness between our points, a direct line of sight--
but perspective wedges
its dimension in
and you disappear
in the narrowing
aperture of this collapse: the world unearthed.

As we approach the far shore of The Lacuna, I still don’t have a word for the post-corona, post-lacuna revised landscape, but I am beginning to see what will be eroded from the map, what will no longer be found where I left it.