Limbo

BY Marie Howe

Each of them can’t decide if there is a God
or if there is a self.

Do I have an I? one says
to another who seems distracted, looking out what might have been a window.

What is the difference between a self and a soul?
Is it true that one god is in relationship to each of us?
Or is the each of us an illusion, and we are the god we are looking for?
That’s what the distracted one is thinking and what
she wants to know,

and she wishes that other person would stop bothering her,
and she wishes she had more time to think about these things,
although she has all the time in the world.

— FROM The Kingdom of Ordinary Time
(W.W. Norton, 2009, p. 23)
REPRINTED WITH THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION

 

Biography

MARIE HOWE is the author of three volumes of poetry: The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2008); The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988); and What the Living Do (W.W. Norton, 1999), and is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea Books, 1995). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, AGNI, Ploughsahres, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University. Read more at www.mariehowe.com

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