And I've only really read like three of her poems. But this is a lovely excerpt from "The Glass Essay" that knocked my socks off. It's a rumination on a lot of things, including general fragility and lost love, but she repeatedly references Emily Bronte and the moors, which I love. Her images are gorgeous:
Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question,
Why cast the world away.
For someone hooked up to thou,
the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.
But in between the neighbor who recalls her
coming in from a walk on the moors
with her face "lit up by a divine light"
and the sister who tells us
Emily never made a friend in her life,
is a space where the little raw soul
slips through.
It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel,
out of sight.
[and then this phenomenal passage:]
...and I go out to walk.
The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April
carve into me with knives of light.
Something inside it reminds me of childhood--
it is the light of the stalled time after lunch
when clocks tick
and hearts shut
and fathers leave to go back to work
and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering
something they never tell.
...Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days,
it is as if I could dip my hand down
into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.
1 comment:
Aaah, that is so perfect.
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