WHITNEY RICKETTS

lunchboxpoems:

The whole month of October
is an elegy, a used book store
getting rained on. This weather
makes me read endings first. Partings
and farewells, the way we’re baffled, startled
when happiness falls. Let me tell you something about darkness, though,
because there’s been enough about light.  But first
about the handwritten poem copied out in the back
of a Rilke translation. It begins with beloved,
I’m tempted to tell you, or with rest,
and is written in the kind of couplets that are made
for each other, lines with stories of how they first met,
and I’m tempted to say that after I read it, light didn’t matter,
nor darkness, that poetry somehow gathers
them both into one word. O, how often we are baffled,
startled by our own happiness. I read the poem
and kept its last three unresolved lines: our
line break hearts. There is a pause always around the word
heart, the history
of leaving, the small right-angled scars of loss. Another line break
then into, a space, then the words: like small trees. We are made up
of small trees, limbs that reach for each other, forest
of longing, root systems of light, small blossoms of darkness
and there is a poem handwritten after pages of Rilke and, after Rilke,
how can our hearts be anything but small trees. The book was used. 

The lines unresolved. It was raining so I sat in the store and read
the ending first. Here happiness falls, sometimes
the only difference between our
and hearts is a line break after a long elegy. This is the season that begins
by ending. The space between light
and darkness is unresolved
as the space between our hearts
and small trees. Beloved, rest. It’s true. I read the ending first
but I kept reading it until I got all the way back
to the beginning.

SUE GOYETTE