Seriozha

(For Anna Karenina)

The birds were still singing
When she stole into his room.

The hallway had been dark,
And now the light, a telltale nuisance,
Threatened to betray her —

(Like that squeaking minx at the opera last week,
Twirling her opera glasses, pointing her brows).

The light hovered dangerously across his eyelids, his mouth,
Wet oval pads, dabbling, drawing closer.

A toy soldier lodged beneath her foot turned over and
Grimaced, quietly — still holding in the dawn.

She remembered her lover —
The gold buttons tight beneath the chin,
His chest held too tightly in,
The way he wrestled with his solitude.

Her son turned over,
His mouth fluttered open, then closed.

The fibrillations of her heart were quite astounding.

Loneliness

‘Nothing has happened but loneliness, perhaps too daily to relate’
(Emily Dickinson, Letter to her cousins, 7 October 1863)

The thick silence of Keswick after midnight
As the mountains rub shoulder to shoulder —
Small imperceptible movements of the muscles.
Your head on the hotel pillow, braiding the hot sheets,
The darkness chewing its upper lip.

A figure running foolishly along a topographical line
she cannot account for
is upbraided — by the slight of the wind,
her knifing.

The mountains turn over and adjust themselves:
These are old quarrels.
There is nothing seismic in any of this.