Dead Reckoning

to estimate one’s position
without instruments
or celestial observations

calculating direction and distance
traveled from the last known fix
while accounting for tides, currents, grief

drift       numbness
sudden storms of pain
unexpected joy

to reckon is to believe
something true
to reckon with the dead

is to believe I can know them
an airy thinness
gleaming

despite
the distance
traveled

I’d like to know how far
I’ve gone
how much farther there is

to go       how absence
unfathomable
becomes

something I can carry

Copyright © 2024 by Hyejung Kook. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 16, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Learning about dead reckoning, a navigation technique used to estimate one’s position at sea, I was struck by how perfect a metaphor it seemed to be for grief—the struggle to find one’s bearings, the ungrounded relativity of everything after someone dies. This poem began as a long sequence but arrived at this stripped-down form after fifteen years of off-and-on revision. It felt right [for it] to be nearly imageless, with the exception of ‘airy thinness,’ which comes from John Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.’”
—Hyejung Kook