Even night is not night enough.
—Franz Kafka, in a letter to Felice, his fiancé, 1913.
When even the night
is not night enough
nor does salt seem
salt enough, and the hole
in the looming who am I
is enormous,
but not enormous enough
to gulp down the damn ego whole,
perhaps that is the time
to sit very still
and forget about writing.
There is nothing,
nothing the words
can do then except
not enough because
nothing is enough,
which is to say
only nothing
is enough, and perhaps
in that inadequate night
we are sufficiently vulnerable
to really know nothing.
This turn near the end makes the poem into something for me:
“which is to say
only nothing
is enough
though I like the progress to get here, the inadequacy of it all. I do think the language actually lets go of the ego — softens — as that ending arrives.