Absence

I am on a Billy Collins kick of late. I don’t usually choose from the same poet this often, but you’ll have to forgive me: it’s February. And my school is currently a mess. And I feel I’ve been pulled to one of those unexpected and, frankly, uninvited vocational and existential crossroads, where no doubt I will be doing next year the same thing with the same folks in the same place as this year but for whatever reason can’t see that far right now. And it’s February. Did I mention that?

In any event, all of this made me think of Billy’s “Absence,” where – as far as I can tell – finding a chess piece of the white night throws him into a similar unexpected musing on the absence of heroes. I mean, aren’t we all a little uncomfortable with the “salt shakers” who seem to be standing in for leaders at our various institutions both local and national? And don’t we long for someone to come back, walking their familiar walk, to advance heroically back onto our field of play.

But what if, I wonder, there are only salt shakers….

Not just now, but always. What then?

“Absence”

This morning as low clouds
skidded over the spires of the city

I found next to a bench
in the park an ivory chess piece –

the white knight as it turned out –
and in the pigeon-ruffling wind

I wondered where all the others were,
lined up somewhere

on their red and black squares,
many of them feeling uneasy

about the saltshaker
that was taking his place,

and all of them secretly longing
for the moment

when the white horse
would reappear out of nowhere

and advance toward the board
with his distinctive motion,

stepping forward, then sideways
before advancing again –

the same move I was making him do
over and over in the sunny field of my palm.

“Absence,” by Billy Collins, from Nine Horses: Poems