RIP Bill Knott

SONNET

Bill Knott

The way the world is not

Astonished at you

It doesn't blink a leaf

When we step from the house

Leads me to think

That beauty is natural, unremarkable

And not to be spoken of

Except in the course of things

The course of singing and worksharing

The course of squeezes and neighbours

The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out

And the course of course of me

Astonished at you

The way the world is not

I enjoyed this poem a lot when I encountered it on today's AAP Poem-a-day. I love its ease and casual (seemingly casual) brilliance, hallmarks of Knott's verse. Then I discovered by scrolling down that its author had died only a couple of weeks ago. Quite a shock.

I first encountered Knott online about ten years ago, ordered his renowned early collection, "The Naomi Poems" at considerable cost through Abe Books, and then his self-published selected, "Goodbye to Prisoner", from the blog of the author himself. We had some correspondence, but he struck me as cagy and bitter, with a harsh penchant for self-deprecation that seemed both a kind of exaggerated put-on, but also genuine, borne of profound self-hatred.  Then I got very busy, and our dialogue fell off.  This article in the New Yorker confirms those impressions, and tells us more about his life and work. Like one of the writers quoted there, I learned to admire him from a distance.

Is the "not" at the end of the first and last lines a play on the author's name? It certainly becomes so, inevitably, in that final, fatal light. (A light all good poetry is written in, of course.)  Anyway, RIP at last, Bill.  Your work will endure.

Another Spring poem

The Enkindled Spring
D. H. Lawrence

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.


A poem well worth knowing, if you don't already. Funny, many of today’s writers (me included) have a hard time in our own practice countenancing such “poetese” (archaic? trite?) word order as “in bonfires green” – but here it works, not only for the purposes of rhyme but explosive effect. It seems that our predilection towards a conversational tone actually hobbles us by restricting our word order choices...

A Crocodile

Hard by the lilied Nile I saw
A duskish river-dragon stretched along,
The brown habergeon of his limbs enamelled
With sanguine almandines and rainy pearl:
And on his back there lay a young one sleeping,
No bigger than a mouse; with eyes like beads,
And a small fragment of its speckled egg
Remaining on its harmless, pulpy snout;
A thing to laugh at, as it gaped to catch
The baulking merry flies. In the iron jaws
Of the great devil-beast, like a pale soul
Fluttering in rocky hell, lightsomely flew
A snowy trochilus, with roseate beak
Tearing the hairy leeches from his throat.


-- Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Answer

Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.

Sir Walter Scott

Rita Dove

Ludwig Van Beethoven's Return to Vienna
by Rita Dove

Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn,
or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me....
The Heiligenstadt Testament

Three miles from my adopted city
lies a village where I came to peace.
The world there was a calm place,
even the great Danube no more
than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape
by a girl's careless hand. Into this stillness

I had been ordered to recover.
The hills were gold with late summer;
my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen,
situated upstairs in the back of a cottage
at the end of the Herrengasse.
From my window I could see onto the courtyard
where a linden tree twined skyward —
leafy umbilicus canted toward light,
warped in the very act of yearning —
and I would feed on the sun as if that alone
would dismantle the silence around me.

At first I raged. Then music raged in me,
rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough
to ease the roiling. I would stop
to light a lamp, and whatever I'd missed —
larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd's
home-toward-evening song — rushed in, and I
would rage again.

I am by nature a conflagration;
I would rather leap
than sit and be looked at.
So when my proud city spread
her gypsy skirts, I reentered,
burning towards her greater, constant light.

Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly— I tell you,
every tenderness I have ever known
has been nothing
but thwarted violence, an ache
so permanent and deep, the lightest touch
awakens it. . . . It is impossible

to care enough. I have returned
with a second Symphony
and 15 Piano Variations
which I've named Prometheus,
after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god
who knew the worst sin is to take
what cannot be given back.

I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And though I dare not lean in to shout
Can't you see that I'm deaf? —
I also cannot stop listening.

Today's Poetry month daily poem from Poem.org. A fine dramatic monologue, this one captures Beethoven's regal, tempestuous nature as he confronts his growing deafness. I love the first three stanzas, the vivid picture they create of the calm paradise to which he has retired, belied by the dread of his own approaching storm. I can almost hear growing crescendos of his 6th symphony, the Pastorale --although he may have been totally deaf by the time he got to that composition. Where I find the poem gets flabby is in the final two stanzas. Too talky, too equivocal, too much commentary. If I were to revise this poem, I would take away the explanation of Titan. Who needs it? Just the name Titan is enough. And end the poem with

I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And I dare not lean in to shout
Can't you see that I am deaf?
-- for I am always listening.

Gender Question #2 by Jennifer Perrine

This remarkable poem by one Jennifer Perrine just won the Goodreads monthly poetry contest. What an exploration of imaginative flights spurred by language! A poet definitely worth watching...

Gender Question #2: Butch, Femme, Androgynous, or All Over the Map?
by Jennifer Perrine

Marking the small check in the small box,
I think: there is no appropriate answer here,
except perhaps Artichoke, impenetrable, thick-petaled
flower, sharp edge and ragged root. Inside,
velvet opal translucent tongues, and inside,
further still, the choke, silky threads who want
to hold in the heart, to raise a spired fortress
for the tender green. This, though, is not an option,

so I choose, All over the map, all over Barbados,
Siam, Constantinople, all over Ireland and Israel,
all over the sierra of my stomach, down the straits
of my legs, to the archipelago of toes.
Somewhere on the circuit, I stop

to visit whatever terrain bears the name Femme,
some scenic dream atop a mountain or nestled
deep within a delta. I watch tourists teem
around the attractions. I snap some shots, too,
so I'll remember what Femme looks like
once I leave. Perhaps, from there, I'll bike

to Butch, a city that sparkles like hubcaps
spun from a swift machine. Some say that there
the stars are drilled through sheets of obsidian,
pressed like grommets into hides of darkest leather.
If the iron gates to town are barred, I'll fly
first-class to Androgynous, where blades of grass glow
silver, the shade of Joan of Arc's sword,
and the sky at sunset runs red as the rouge
on Bowie's cheeks. The land shifts,
rolls and recedes like the tide, carries me out

and out, to my home, my artichoke home,
my platypus home, my webbed feet
and beak and fur. I trace again my small mark
in my small box, my small window
from which I watch landscapes reach
like frail fingers into space,
into the places we have not named.

Sometimes...

Via Peter Pereira's blog, this lovely poem by Sheenagh Pugh, that, as Peter puts it, seems perfect for the moment we are living in (though it appears the poet has disowned this poem, for various reasons (?)...)

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you.

© Sheenagh Pugh

Some real poetry, for a change...

FOR PETER, MY COUSIN

The night you died, I heard your cello shift --
a scraping in its corner in the barn.
Alfalfa pillowed it. White breath of pigs
was wreathed around the scroll; the cattle mourned.
For years its neck had rested by your ear.
Your bow across its strings and belly filled
the burlap sacks with apples, dusky tarns
of sound. You listened to that voice until
your marriage. Then she didn't let you play.
Her own voice, hoarse from children, saw you lean
in longing to the shovel, hurl the hay.
She felt your fingers press the strings in dream.
Your heart collapsed too soon -- you died asleep.
Beside you she heard wood and horsehair weep.

--Barbara Nickel, The Gladys Elegies (Cocteau Books, 1997), reprinted in Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, edited by Zachariah Wells, (Biblioasis, 2008). This, belatedly, is supplementary material for my review of Jailbreaks in The Rover. Compliments to Barbara Nickel, Cocteau Books & Biblioasis.

Katia Grubisic

ON THE EVE OF RETURN TO HAMELIN

On stilts in the metro of a Friday
morning, he plays to no one but the station’s
dally: the piper draws us out.

We scatter asunder our cloaks, our half
hearted aubades, and give over our
mourning to play with the station’s

indoor birds, blurs of yellow and red
scattered asunder. He wields the half-cloaked
promise of foil balloons, their silver sides

winking light: the piper draws us on.
The tune he plays is not yet invented.
A heart’s murmur, it doesn’t offer

the name of this mountain,
nor does it pledge return in silver-sided balloons
drawn by birds of red, yellow.

We have chiselled ourselves,
with grief no one wanted,
like fingernails or glaciers over

this mountain we called nameless.
We gnashed our way across jealousy,
as if we could claim birds, claim red,

claim yellow. And the piper brings us out
from the mountain he scattered us under.
With his fingers of silver he cracks

the rock where the light gets in and we follow
on stilts from the metro the Friday
on the eve of return to Hamelin.

-- a poem I very much liked in Katia Grubisic’s What if red ran out. Part of the reason may be very personal: I, and many Montrealers, have seen this man who, dressed in rainbow colours and standing on tall stilts (and wearing extra-long flowing pants to cover those stilts, and maintain a wondrous illusion), played the flute in the Metro, silver balloons floating in the air beside him. What a beautiful evocation of this memory! (Why didn’t I write a poem about him???) Notice the pantoum-like repetition of "birds", “yellow and red”, “scattered asunder/under”, variations of "silver" and “silver-sided”, “stilts”, “metro”, "mountain", "draws us out" , all interlaced in a soothing musical fugue.

This is very much a Montreal poem – Montreal, like Hamelin, has its mountain (see here to read up on the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the legend which, of course, very much informs this poem), and that man epitomizes a certain Montreal verve and style (one need only think also of Cirque du Soleil), shared perhaps only with Quebec City and Paris.

If I have any criticism, it’s that the writer dwells on the “we” too long. If I were to revise this poem, I would possibly strike out

We gnashed our way across jealousy, etc.

… and maybe work in the reiteration of colourful birds somehow else. The reasons? She already refers to "giving over our mourning" to the piper; I'm not sure the jealousy she speaks of applies; besides, I want to go back immediately to the flute man on stilts! Readers of this blog might know how allergic I am to this indefinite "we" – and here, too, as so often happens in that person, the writer pontificates just a bit too much.

Be that as it may, it’s still a remarkable poem.

I wonder where that man is now? I never see him anymore. I also don’t take the Metro nearly as much as I used to. In any case, here he is, in this poem.

NB, this is supplementary material to a review of Katia Grubisic’s What if red ran out and David O’Meara’s Noble Gas, Penny Black, soon to be posted in The Rover. My compliments to Katia Grubisic and to Goose Lane Editions.

Further link: "Root Cellar" by David O'Meara, a poem in Noble Gas, Penny Black.

FALL

     after Rilke

The leaves are falling, falling from the trees
in dying gardens far above us; as if their slow
free-fall was the sky declining.

And tonight, this heavy earth is falling away
from all the other stars, drawing into silence.
We are all falling now.  My hand, my heart,
stall and drift in darkness, see-sawing down.

And we still believe there is one who sifts and holds
the leaves, the lives, of all those softly falling.

-- Robin Robertson
New British Poetry edited by Don Paterson & Charles Simic

Charles Simic

Lots of grotesquery in this man's work -- particularly the early work, which I'm now reading. This one has the raw and cryptic force of a Francis Bacon painting. You can hear him read it here.

FORK

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird's foot
Worn around the cannibal's neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
It's head which is like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

SPIRAL


The day my husband left
our G.P. choked on oaths un-Hippocratic.
“If pain persists,” he cried,
“throw his clothes out the window.”
I watched them fly: socks, shorts, shirts –
               every single tie.

The day my husband left
I made myself a dry martini,
missing the cool precision of his lemon peeler –
               its perfect spiral.



--Nina Bruck, Still Light at 5:00

A favourite Bukowski poem

THE TRAGEDY OF THE LEAVES

I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,
the potted plants yellow as corn;
my woman was gone
and the empty bottles like bled corpses
surrounded me with their uselessness;
the sun was still good, though,
and my landlady's note cracked in fine and
undemanding yellowness; what was needed now
was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester
with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd
because it exists, nothing more;
I shaved carefully with an old razor
the man who had once been young and
said to have genius; but
that's the tragedy of the leaves,
the dead ferns, the dead plants;
and I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world has failed us
both

Gwendolyn MacEwen

In my spare hours in TO I read Gwendolyn MacEwen's The T.E. Lawrence Poems, from cover to cover. Suitable, perhaps, to be reading a Toronto poet in TO. While I made my escape by moving six hours down the highway, she did so by traveling and feeding her imagination on more exotic sources. Much of her work draws on ancient Egyptian and other mythologies; this collection, which some consider her best, is a fragmented narrative of the life of Lawrence of Arabia. Long have I admired this poet's brilliance. Her two-volume selected is one of my treasured possessions. She was, for better or for worse (better for her poetry, I like to believe), a poet who lived on the edge: she dropped out of high school at 18 to write, lived by her considerable wits and never looked back at (or forward to) any sort of academic career. Unfortunately, despite her substantial contribution to Canadian letters -- which was recognized through many awards including the GG, inclusions in major anthologies, etc. -- she died alone, poor, of alcohol related causes in downtown Toronto at the age of 46. (Need I editorialize? In Japan, an artist of her stature would have been named a National Treasure.) Below is perhaps my favourite poem in the TE Lawrence collection; because a Google search turned up nothing, I transcribed it here (only approximating, within the limits of my html encoding, the formatting of the lines).

THE DESERT

Only God lives there in the seductive Nothing
That implodes into pure light.  English makes Him
an ugly monosyllable, but Allah breathes
A fiery music from His tongue, ignites the sands,
invents a terrible love that is
The very name of pain.

The desert preserves Him
as the prophets found Him, massive and alone.
They went there, into that awful Zero
                      to interpret Him,
for Himself to know, for He said:  Help me,
I am the One who is alone, not you.  Tell Me who I am.

Camels lean into the desert, lost in some thought
so profound it can only be guessed.  When
Will God invent man?  When
           will the great dream end?
My skin crawls with a horrible beauty in this
Nothingness, this Everything –

I fall to my knees in the deep white sand, and my head
implodes into pure light.

-- Gwendolyn MacEwen, from The T.E. Lawrence Poems

For those who don't know her, here's a small sampling of other poems. If you have only time for one, try Dark Pines Under Water. I won't say any more; just try it.

Strand: Addendum

Having finished Strand's Blizzard of One, my overall impression is much kinder than my rather snarky remarks made in mid-read below. I can say now it was a worthwhile and enjoyable read, well worth buying. Poems that impressed me were "The Great Poet Returns" (quoted below), "The Blizzard of One", "Two de Chiricos", "In Memory of Joseph Brodsky", and the final poem, "The View". I also enjoyed his longish penultimate poem, "Delirium Waltz". That's quite a number of excellent poems for one collection (well, "The Great Poet Returns" is excellent, until those final lines...). I can see why Strand hasn't published a book since, and may never publish: the book seems a definitive bidding adieu to poetry, and life. That in itself is weighty, and significant. Here's "In Memory of Joseph Brodsky", perhaps the most moving poem in the collection. Pls. excuse what the formatting does to some of the longer lines.

In Memory of Joseph Brodsky

It could be said, even here, that what remains of the self
Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust, and heads
To a place where knowing and nothing pass into each other, and through;
That it moves, unwinding still, beyond the vault of brightness ended,
And continues to a place which may never be found, where the unsayable,
Finally, once more is uttered, but lightly, quickly, like random rain
That passes in sleep, that one imagines passes in sleep.
What remains of the self unwinds and unwinds, for none
Of the boundaries holds – neither the shapeless one between us,
Nor the one that falls between your body and your voice. Joseph,
Dear Joseph, those sudden reminders of your having been – the places
And times whose greatest life was the one you gave them – now appear
Like ghosts in your wake. What remains of the self unwinds
Beyond us, for whom time is only a measure of meanwhile
And the future no more than et cetera et cetera ... but fast and forever.

Love after Love
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Blizzard of One

After more than two years of sitting on my bookshelf, Mark Strand's Blizzard of One has come down into my hands and I'm giving it a read. Today (well, technically yesterday) I read about two thirds, looked over others, some of which I remember from his reading in Montreal back in 2004. These poems provide a number of haunting moments -- all of them are finely wrought -- but I frankly don't find they have have the verve, edge or originality of those neurotic, weird, ground-breaking early poems. That may be too much to expect. "An extraordinary book by a master of the art of poetry...." says the blurb. I quite agree, but for that "extra". My hunch is that it was his reputation that won that Pulitzer, not the book itself. Nevertheless, to give him his due, so far I've read a couple of poems -- make that three poems -- that would have shone in his earlier Selected. Here's one, a personal favourite so far:

The Great Poet Returns

When the light poured down through the hole in the clouds,
We knew the great poet was going to show. And he did.
A limousine with all white tires and stained-glass windows
Dropped him off. And then, with a clear and soundless fluency,
He strode into the hall. There was a hush. His wings were big.
The cut of his suit. The width of his tie, were out of date.
When he spoke, the air seemed whitened by imagined cries.
The worm of desire bore into the heart of everyone there.
There were tears in their eyes. The great one was better than ever.
“No need to rush,” he said at the close of the reading, “the end
Of the world is only the end of the world as you know it.”
How like him, everyone thought. Then he was gone,
And the world was blank. It was cold and the air was still.
Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?
Can anyone die without even a little?

Frankly, tho, I find the last two lines of rhetorical questioning a little questionable. Are they not a false tail? They kind of resonate with the narrative voice and concern, and yes, I want to root for that implicit defence of poetry in the final line -- it's a nice sentiment, it comes out of a lifetime's dedication -- but wouldn't the poem have better ended with, "the air was still"?

There's a fair bit on Mark Strand in this blog -- including, I see, another false tail. If you're interested, click on the label below.

IT DIDN'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE

Maurice Kenny

He was gonna teach us...
my sisters and me how not to smoke
or drink burning whiskey, and
oh yes...how to swim in the lake...
much to my mother's screaming and
flailing arms in summer air.
(She hated the Chaumont Bay
cottage with a passion. A camp
he near worshipped and we kids
adored from late June to late
August.) He knew he was right,
my mother wrong; it was done
only for our good and safety.
He'd load us into the rowboat
one at a time, myself last
as the youngest of three, row
out 25 or 50 feet and dump
the kid overboard, and force
a swim home even if yhou
didn't know how...you'd learn
on the spot was his philosophy.
Later we had cigars to smoke
and vomit. Then he brought
out the whiskey bottle.
Forced us to drink until drunk,
and very very sick. At six
I became an alcoholic.
It didn't work so well, but he
had good intentions.

Saranac Review, #3, 2008


Maurice Kenny is a poet, publisher and professor. His book Blackrobe was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and, in 1984, he won the American Book Award for The Mama Poems. Kenny's work has appeared in nearly 100 journals. Presently, he teaches at SUNY Potsdam.

Easy Readin' Poet #3: Billy Collins

I wrote about this guy before, and this is what I said:

Accessible, charming, brilliant. A romp. If humour columnists Josh Freed (Montreal Gazette) or Gary Lautens (Toronto Star) wrote poetry, this is how they would write. Actually, I find a lien to Italo Calvino. In particular, Mr. Palomar.

I was talking, by the way, about his 2002 new & selected, Sleeping Alone Around the Room. I enjoy the once-through, a few poems the twice-through, but three times, well... comparisons come to mind of eating candy floss. This ex-Poet Laureate, though, is too easy to diss. Here's a personal favourite:

PURITY

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,
weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.
This is how I go about it:
I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.
Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile
as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only
a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.
I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.
I do this so that what I write will be pure,
completely rinsed of the carnal,
uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them
on a small table near the window.
I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms
when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

Now I sit down at at the desk, ready to begin.
I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.
I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.
Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,
most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe
where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

After a spell of this I remove my penis too.
Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.
Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.
Now I write only about death, most classical of themes
in language light as the air between my ribs.

Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.
I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh
and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage
and speed through woods on winding country roads,
passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,
all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

Easy Readin' Poet #2: Robert Creeley

Famous for pared-down poems wherein every word, every syllable counts (and usually in more ways than one), Creeley is nevertheless an easy read. I ordered his Selected shortly after he died in 2005, and started reading it in earnest last September. (Death and big prizes are the only mainstream PR poets get, and I must admit I'm as affected as any). I haven't finished yet -- set the book aside after reading about two-thirds of its 350-odd pages -- but for a while I was reading and savouring one poem after another during waits for buses, short subway rides, coffee breaks and even commercials on The National and The Daily Show. Considering how fragmented our attention spans have become, poets like him make me wonder why more folks don't read poetry these days. But then, most people, I'm afraid, really don't like to think that intensely, even if only for a few minutes.

Speaking of that commercial -- or rather anti-commercial -- connection, here's a quote from an obit in the Guardian:

Rejecting the language of a mass America lost to "gray emptiness, bled out in congealing dollars and the victim of its own static habits", he sought value in "the intimate, familiar, localising, detailing, speculative, emotional, unending talking that has given my life a way of thinking of itself in the very fact and feeling of existence. God knows one wants no end to that ever."

The most oft-quoted poems are the epigram-like ones -- those that fit snugly at the end of a newspaper column. See, for instance, the poem at the end of that obit -- a favourite of mine. Here though is one in a more relaxed mode. When you title a poem "The Moon", you'd better do something damned original with it. I think Creeley succeeds here.

THE MOON

Earlier in the evening the moon
was clear to the east,
over the snow of the yard
and fields---a lovely

bright clarity and perfect
roundness, isolate,
riding as they say the
black sky. Then we went

about our businesses of the
evening, eating supper, talking,
watching television, then
going to bed, making love,

and then to sleep. But before
we did I asked her to look
out the window at the moon
now straight up, so that

she bent her head and looked
sharply up, to see it.
Through the night it must
have shone on, in that

fact of things---another
moon, another night---a
full moon in the winter's
space, a white loneliness.

I came awake to the blue
white light in the darkness,
and felt as if someone
were there, waiting, alone.