Today I teach my last class of the semester. I'm in the moment of endings; many of the blogs I read and the friends I have are in the same boat. So many of us are thinking naturally of endings, of crossing in the rickety vessel the river Lethe.
And so I thought I'd post a poem I particularly love, from a book I can't recommend enough. This is "The Halo That Would Not Light" from Lucie Brock-Broido's terribly beautiful book Trouble in Mind. It's the first poem in the book. There are indentations on the 3rd, 5th, 12th, 14th, and last lines that blogger won't let me recreate.
The Halo That Would Not Light
When, after many years, the raptor beak
Let loose of you,
He dropped your tiny body
In the scarab-colored hollow
Of a carriage, left you like a finch
Wrapped in its nest of linens wound
With linden leaves in a child's cardboard box.
Tonight the wind is hover-
Hunting as the leater seats of a swings go back
And forth with no one in them
As certain and invisible as
Red scarves silking endlessly
From a magician's hollow hat
And the spectacular catastrophe
Of your endless childhood
Is done.
--Lucie Brock-Broido.
And so I thought I'd post a poem I particularly love, from a book I can't recommend enough. This is "The Halo That Would Not Light" from Lucie Brock-Broido's terribly beautiful book Trouble in Mind. It's the first poem in the book. There are indentations on the 3rd, 5th, 12th, 14th, and last lines that blogger won't let me recreate.
The Halo That Would Not Light
When, after many years, the raptor beak
Let loose of you,
He dropped your tiny body
In the scarab-colored hollow
Of a carriage, left you like a finch
Wrapped in its nest of linens wound
With linden leaves in a child's cardboard box.
Tonight the wind is hover-
Hunting as the leater seats of a swings go back
And forth with no one in them
As certain and invisible as
Red scarves silking endlessly
From a magician's hollow hat
And the spectacular catastrophe
Of your endless childhood
Is done.
--Lucie Brock-Broido.
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