Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky.
I pulled from my throat birdsong like tin- canned lullaby [its vicious cold its hoax of wings] choking on bones at the throat rabbit’s foot for luck arbitrary as a dune grave across a vastness Named the place penni- less motherhood Named the place country of mothers Named the place anywhere but death by self-
— Jennifer Givhan, from “Of Color of Landscape of Tenuous Rope,” Belly to the Brutal
I walk in the chill of the late autumn night
like Orpheus
Thinking my song, anxious to look back,
My vanished life an ornament, a drifting cloud, behind me,
A soft, ashen transcendence
Buried and resurrected once, then time and again.
— Charles Wright, from “North American Bear,” North American Bear: Poems (Sutton Hoo Press, 1999)
I turn around on the gravel and go back to the house for a book, something to read at the doctor’s office, and while I am inside, running the finger of inquisition along a shelf, another me that did not bother to go back to the house for a book heads out on his own, rolls down the driveway, and swings left toward town, a ghost in his ghost car, another knot in the string of time, a good three minutes ahead of me— a spacing that will now continue for the rest of my life. Sometimes I think I see him a few people in front of me on a line or getting up from a table to leave the restaurant just before I do, slipping into his coat on the way out the door. But there is no catching him, no way to slow him down and put us back in synch, unless one day he decides to go back to the house for something, but I cannot imagine for the life of me what that might be. He is out there always before me, blazing my trail, invisible scout, hound that pulls me along, shade I am doomed to follow, my perfect double, only bumped an inch into the future, and not nearly as well-versed as I in the love poems of Ovid— I who went back to the house that fateful winter morning and got the book.
“No—I don’t write: I open a breach in the dusk so the dead can send messages through.
What is this job of writing? To steer by mirror-light in darkness. To imagine a place known only to me. To sing of distances, to hear the living notes of painted birds on Christmas trees.
My nakedness bathed you in light. You pressed against my body to drive away the great black frost of night.
“And as the night wears on,
The dim allegory of ourselves Unfolds, and we
Feel dreamed by someone else,
A sleeping counterpart, Who gathers in
The darkness of his person
Shades of the real world.”
The sunset is always moving
no matter how poor or flashy it is,
but still more moving
is the last, desperate glow
that turns the distant plains to rust
when the sun has finally sunk.
It hurts us to be with
that strange, tense light,
that hallucination
imposing itself upon space,
with our shared fear of shadows
and what suddenly ceases
when we see our error,
as a dream sometimes ceases
when we see we are dreaming.
Back in my room
I can’t hear the river passing like time,
or the moon emerging from the shadow of earth,
but I can see the water that never repeats itself.
It’s very difficult to look at the World
and into your heart at the same time.
— Jim Harrison, from “The Davenport Lunar Eclipse,” Complete Poems, ed. Joseph Bednarik (Copper Canyon Press, 2021)
“the words forever bound to certain people, like catchwords, or to a specific spot on the N14 because a passenger happened to say them just as we were driving by, and we cannot pass that place again without the words leaping up like the buried water jets at the Summer Palace of Peter the Great, which spray when you walk across them…”
— Annie Ernaux, The Years (trans. Alison L. Strayer)
