Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Small Gods of Grief, winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001, and A New Hunger selected as an ALA Notable Book. Her poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily, on The Academy of American Poets‘ website, on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and has been published in such publications as Orion, Georgia Review and Harvard Review, among others. A Pushcart Prize recipient, she is a member of the founding faculty at the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College, in Boston. Her website can be found here. --------
I was twenty then
I was twenty & remember how in stores,
tramways or cafés, I’d catch someone’s gaze,
eyes that took me in, and held me there
for an instant. Their brief glint —
like mica — offered to me &,
just like that, my loneliness
shattered.
Everything seemed lit — then disappeared again — in a blink,
inside those red-gray shadows of a blink.
I’d search again, then, and again for other eyes,
other heart- gasping moments, to take me in
& hold me there —
it didn’t matter how briefly
as long as, for an instant, I was held.
*****
(With him, when — from across a table, crowd or pillow — his gaze
took me in & held & held
me — it was I
who looked away first. Oh, it was I.)
Some nights
Some nights, settled against him, my face in his neck, I missed him —
feeling he was elsewhere.
The day after he died I bought a new bed, his imprint in ours unbearable
now that he was nowhere.
How can I say
How can I say this, if not in the simplest way:
Sometimes, I loved to hear — I loved to listen rather —
to the simple shush of his sleeve on our table.
Something he didn’t hear
as I listened to him being alive.
I had planned to tell him that.
Dusk at the end
Dusk at the end
of the old stone pier. Pelicans dive
deep into the waves as we had into each other.
I stand here, remembering that, but can’t
remember his body’s weight on mine.
That man I knew by body & skin & belly & heart —
I have already forgotten his weight on me.