Poem
Patrick McGuinness
The White Place
The White Place
The White Place
One afternoon we watched a programme on near-deathexperiences: a woman tunnelled back through life
to what came after, and was reluctant
to return, since her life paled beside the white place
she’d been pulled back from. Now she lived between the two,
nostalgic for the afterwards she’d died into.
The next day, dozing on a stationary train
you woke and asked the question that had woken
in your mind as if it were on mine: ‘The white place’
you asked, ‘will anybody else be there?’
I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought to ask – no one
had – if in the white place we’d be alone
or with other people. You asked about
your friends, if the best of here translates
to there, or if we leave, as we come in, alone.
I still don’t know. I think that we are not alone.
I think it less for your sake now than for my own.
© 2004, Patrick McGuinness
From: The Canals of Mars
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester
From: The Canals of Mars
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester
Patrick McGuinness
(Tunisia, 1968)
Patrick McGuinness is a poet, novelist, translator and academic, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he has taught since 1998. He lives in North West Wales. His poetry, published by Carcanet, has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003, the Poetry Business Prize in 2006, ...
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Poems of Patrick McGuinness
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The White Place
One afternoon we watched a programme on near-deathexperiences: a woman tunnelled back through life
to what came after, and was reluctant
to return, since her life paled beside the white place
she’d been pulled back from. Now she lived between the two,
nostalgic for the afterwards she’d died into.
The next day, dozing on a stationary train
you woke and asked the question that had woken
in your mind as if it were on mine: ‘The white place’
you asked, ‘will anybody else be there?’
I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought to ask – no one
had – if in the white place we’d be alone
or with other people. You asked about
your friends, if the best of here translates
to there, or if we leave, as we come in, alone.
I still don’t know. I think that we are not alone.
I think it less for your sake now than for my own.
From: The Canals of Mars
The White Place
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