Poem of the Week | November 17, 2025

“Video Ergo Sum” by Traci Brimhall is our Poem of the Week.

Traci Brimhall is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, The New Republic, Orion, Ploughshares, and the New York Times Magazine. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Park Service, and the Academy of American Poets. She currently serves as the poet laureate of Kansas and the 2025 Poet in Residence at the Guggenheim.

VIDEO ERGO SUM

You can’t tell me that a box is not an archive

of pleasure. It holds all the delicious thingness

of the world—driftwood, lost toys, butterflies,

a photo of an eclipse. I would also argue painting

a landscape is a way to bring the world inside

to finish its dying. I’m not open to debating

whether the starling next to a candle is a still life.

We both know it’s a portrait of the bird I’ll miss

most when I die. You know I love how a busy

murmuration makes a living calligraphy in the sky.

I have a lusty eye, which doesn’t mean I hang out

at hotel bars but in galleries, where awe chases me

from wall to wall, from color fields to bodies so precise

their beauty is forensic. When I saw my first dead body

I couldn’t rest with the seeing so I laid a finger to its lips,

which were sewn shut and slicked to appear alive.

That was one of my first lessons in looking, how the eye

lies. But, my God, the beholding almost felt like touch.

I know what you’re thinking—what’s that got to do

with anything? For a long time I loved ugliness

because I thought it was more true. But beauty can

be a productive confusion. It can teach you that

a circle never sleeps or that a bouquet of white flowers

can look like a skull in a saint’s folded hands.

My self-portrait looks like a book in a birdcage,

but also like a phoenix confusing an urn with an egg.

It’s so easy for one idea to pose as another, like pretending

emotional intelligence is the same as emotional health,

or how forgiveness disguises itself as time. I’m sorry

but it’s foolish to believe the experts. Sure, they make

great clerks for nostalgia, but I need to stand in front

of the mural myself, let my body be the scale, confront

the century. Spoiler alert—I see therefore I am intimate

with longing, am cutting the boards for a new box,

a sculpture of all this living I have done without you.

Author’s Note

“Video Ergo Sum” is the name of one of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, which I saw at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art when I was visiting Notre Dame. I’ve never been good at ekphrastic of a single work of art. My brain is a chaotic organ, so the poem leaps from its starting point to other pieces in the gallery and other pieces of my life. The museum sign stated Cornell’s box contained items he collected wandering the streets of New York when he was caring for his brother. I love the ephemera collected and made monumental, a reliquary for a day and a moment. The poem becomes my own little monument to the morning I spent in the museum and how my heart and mind wandered farther than a frame or a box or all the ways we try and hold a body and its life.