Empty to Hold
By Calypso Bleess
Give me a thousand things to fill my eyes,
to occupy my mind. Now, with these.
I shall sit on an empty floor and run them
through my head. A wonderful thing for me,
empty mind clutter-based.
You say that I am nonsense. I whisper,
sing-hum that I thrive on nonsensical,
on not knowing, on lack of understanding,
on just being there, the edge of existence.
Now I sit on an empty floor and hold
in my empty hands a doll, a set of dolls,
nesting dolls. Green, almost seeming
speckled in gold. But that is their clothes,
their ornamentation. This matryoshka is familiar
to me in that way of a dream, in that way of a
memory so faded I must ask someone else if it is
real. Setting gently on the floor the doll that
I am not holding, I let my presence be graced
with an old harmonica.
Thing of childhood, thing of rust and home.
Brand engraved on the side, blurry to my eyes
no matter how close I hold it to my face. Cool
metal, wrong notes, soft-solid wood under teeth
and lips, a child does not know how to play
the harmonica. Bring it to my lips and grab
a single note, will not manage another. I never learned
to play this harmonica. It tastes the same is it did
when I was three, I should not have stored a musical
instrument in my toy-box. I should not remember
what it tasted like.
Put it down, let it fade into the floor. These things
that I do not really hold, they are gentle in
a way that I have forgotten how to be.
Now, I sit in my empty room, on my
empty barren floor. Hands so full that my memory
will be the last thing to empty.
Artist’s Statement
I spend a lot of time in my memory. Not messing with could-have-beens or what-ifs, but looking at what was. It is a state not entirely connected to reality, and feeling very of its own. Empty to Hold is meant to convey this feeling to a reader or listener. The objects presented in the poem are items that were given to me by family members when I was young (incredibly young, barely old enough to remember) and lost within a year or two. Lost as they are, they are not insignificant. The poem is an attempt to convey these objects, and my life as I remember it, to an audience.
It is a direct response to my interactions with a world now intangible. No longer accessible, but still very much real to me. A world that was not viewed in its entirety because of the age of the viewer, but in objects in moments that are much more vivid than a whole world ever could be. In that, it is a story of reminiscence, loss, and intangibility. Spending so much time in a world past takes me out of the now, but leaving the world behind is an idea that exists in a brain too terrified of forgetting to even try.
Calypso Bleess is a young musician and writer based in the midwest. Writing mostly unstructured poetry, they spend as much time being unserious as possible, between concerts and college applications.
