The Thing Of No Thing Poem by Massoud Abolfathi

The Thing of No Thing

To the Memory of that beautiful woman, Kim, who was my teacher,
To her sudden leaping into the no thing of death



It just happened like nothing
Like a thing that lost its thingness
What happened to that thing
The memory thing

The one Kim, the other migrant left of her thing
What is left if no thing of anything
This is the way we think things
Somewhere in nowhere a thing happens
And then it is like nothing happened

There at the corner, in the curve of a moment
There in the room called Lab
In the memory of no thing
Things happen


There in the distance
An immigrant with no thing
Granting no place to go
Not getting no where
He does migrate in that moment
Remembering something of?
The thing of moments?
The curve of somewhere?

The melody of her fading in the distance
And the migrant the Charlie
Remembering the moment

It is been a time that we no need time
The present of what never acting like a time
The death, the curve of its fragile move
At the shoulder of another migrant
At the corner of days
In the corner of lab and Anna
She the Kim enters the impossible
The time of no thing the death
The thing of I the Tec*
The time of no passing, the pause


The time of a memory gone to the wind
The time of Kim making a hole
In the lost memory of a migrant
On the other side of planet

Is this not what is leaving behind
Of a thing called melody
Of her the Kim, of her the smile
The beauty of what no name to call?


Massoud Abolfathi
Submitted: Friday, August 27,2010


*-Referring to Instructional Technologies (ITEC) at SF State University where my beloved teacher Kim Forman used to teach. She was killed in a car accident in Africa.