I know that He exists.
Somewhere – in silence –
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.
—Emily Dickinson, “I know that He exists. (365)”
Can’t show them no aliens.
Do they want to believe
no shadow pulls the strings,
no mean trick twirls in my eyes?
Still my evidence proves
the lie’s depth, how it persists.
Can’t point to Earth a ball of ocean,
not a photo; not an equation.
My lips move. A gentle breeze. A kiss.
(I know that he exists.)
Here are six impossible things I know
before breakfast (of 1. loaves and 2. fishes):
- blood 4. water 5. the crack of bone
- the dull screams of the past
millennia. My own fallibility? I am
an unreliable narrator. Okay, I repent:
I’m just lying here, playing
dead and with myself.
They might accept some evidence,
that somewhere – in silence –
I made it all up. It’s my nature.
Intention, profession, effect. Nothing
can come of nothing. Can’t show how I did
not open. My bundle of negative
energy appears in its absence (as reasonable
doubt). Knowledge is a weapon. Can’t show
I did not offer. My body
lies. It looks okay. My words are too breathy
and happy. Speak again. Too heavy, too full of grief.
He has hid his rare life
from the paparazzi,
unfairly pursued. I know he exists. Interview him!
He’s canon. He’s the bomb. A stable
observer. Until he says so,
anything goes! I’m a troublesome quantum.
How can I live up? Do I
exist? I don’t know anymore.
Irritating/intangible, a flickering body,
strobing sparks of lies
from my gross eyes.
K. I. Press is a Winnipeg-based poet originally from Alberta. Her books include Exquisite Monsters (Turnstone Press, 2015) and Types of Canadian Women (Gaspereau Press, 2006).
Questions and Answers
Is there a specific moment that inspired you to pursue poetry?
The moment that most comes to mind is when I realized I had read “Jabberwocky” so many times that I had accidentally memorized it. I was around 8 or 9. I pursued memorizing poems after that and, eventually, started to write them.
Do you use any resources that a young poet would find useful?
My local writers’ organization was a great source of information and encouragement to me as a young writer. I grew up in Alberta, so the organization I joined was the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. They had a great newsletter, and I absorbed so much about how the nuts and bolts of writing and publishing worked. Later, I also joined the League of Canadian Poets and met a lot of great people that way. Becoming a writer is so much about community, so meeting people is more important to writing than you might at first think.
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
I’m no philosopher, but my understanding is it is much harder to prove that something doesn’t exist than to prove that something does exist. I was doing some basic reading in theology and this came up regarding atheism. I wanted to explore how this idea relates to how sexual assault is understood (or misunderstood). If proving that a sexual assault occurred rests on proving that consent did not occur, then, even disregarding all the other factors stacked against a sexual assault victim, they are at an inherent logical disadvantage having to prove an absence.
What poetic techniques do you use in this poem? How much attention do you pay to form and metre?
This poem is in a fairly well-known form called a glosa. P. K. Page helped popularize this form in Canada in 1994 with her book of glosas, Hologram. I was a young poet then, and I jumped on the glosa bandwagon, eventually writing a fairly successful series of them. I returned to glosas recently because I was particularly interested in engaging with how classic poems (in this case, Dickinson) depict God, and glosas are a good option for engaging with other poems. I love writing in forms because I am more productive when working with constraints; in the case of the glosa, the lines you quote from another poem determine the rhymes. Classic forms also make me feel more like I am part of a centuries-long conversation.