To Do Away With Things Poem by Elizabeth Robinson

To do away with things
Does
darkness initiate love —
as some lovers
turn out the light — what does
the beloved thing
do in its darkness, which
is to ask is darkness
a thing, is the act
of bodies conjoining
a thing, a verb a thing?
Things, they beset themselves
and must be given away, giving
away the punchline of
a wistful joke, bequeathing
memory to silence, tossing the clothes
to the floor.
Things are ambivalence, always
they practice themselves before
they run out of themselves. The
dissolution of presence being
presence's surest marker. One
who loves it
removes it: yes,
the house, the garden,
the fruit trees, the quest,
the music of it, the image
of it, the
making of the made thing.
The less-visible
world is still visible
in its own darkness. It is not
the bird in the cage who
hovers near the mirror.
But it may turn away from meeting its own gaze.
A thing persevering
is indiscriminate of, or
to, itself, whether the
thing is an act, a seashell,
an object hidden at the base
of a tree, the thing professing
its attention to itself despite
all disappearance.
Eros and all disappearance
being their own stubborn
blessing.
Whatever that darkness, one wanders in it.
Stealthy
to what it wants, to whom it
speaks when it speaks, not
lost but absorbed in the
darkness and given away
by it.