During The Impossible Age Of Everyone

Ada Limón

1.
There are so many people who’ve come before us,
arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.
Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,
generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.
I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.

2.
If you walk long enough, your crowded head clears,
like how all the cattle run off loudly as you approach.
This fence is a good fence, but I doubt my own haywire
will hold up to all this blank sky, so open and explicit.
I’m like a fence, or a cow, or that word, yonder.

3.
There is a slow tractor traffic hollering outside,
and I’d like not to be traffic, but the window shaking.
Your shoes are piled up with mine, and the heat
comes on, makes a simple noise, a dog-yawn.
People have done this before, but not us.

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I really love this poem, particularly for the last line of part 1: I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour. I’ve used this in various forms in my own writing. Generally lovely though, especially the end as well. Ada is really good at deliving the hit in one short line here, building it up and you know it’s coming but you don’t really and then bam there’s one line at the end of each stanza and oof. Pattern is always present, I suppose.