The Annihilation of Nothing

BY THOM GUNN
Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name
That nightly I rehearsed till led away
To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.

In this a huge contagious absence lay,

More space than space, over the cloud and slime,
Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.

Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,

Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,
And welcomed zero as a paradigm.

But now it breaks—images burst with fire

Into the quiet sphere where I have bided,
Showing the landscape holding yet entire:

The power that I envisaged, that presided

Ultimate in its abstract devastations,
Is merely change, the atoms it divided

Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.

Only an infinite finitude I see
In those peculiar lovely variations.

It is despair that nothing cannot be

Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark
Of dread.
Look upward. Neither firm nor free,

Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.

Thom Gunn, “The Annihilation of Nothing” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 2009 by Thom Gunn. Used by permission
of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

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Source: Poetry (Poetry, 1958)