Everything in the World is Open

Everything in the world is

already open, extended.

Waiting to be known.

There is nothing hidden,

no secret impulse; nothing

ravenous, as the

appetite of history,

at the core.

No, there is nothing at the core.

Everything is here. Ready.

Waiting to be known.

Even the centre—so long adrift

as to be finally irrelevant,

and language, too. Despite

or because of this. Everything still

exists, still holds. There is no

single way of pronouncing it. This

is the gift, this is the only

offering. It is not too much.

Take it.

Published online July 17, 2013

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize winning novel, The Sentimentalists, a book of short fiction, This Will Be Difficult to Explain, and Other Stories, and two collections of poetry, I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being and Late Nights With Wild Cowboys. She lives in Tucson, Arizona where she is working on a collection of critical essays and a second novel.