blackbird online journal spring 2002 vol.1 no. 1

POETRY


MARGARET GIBSON

East Window, Moon

It shadows the bed with a lattice of light,
this moon whose ridge pole sinks beneath its own weight,

rising slowly, laboriously, late.

I’m in a new house, unfamiliar to my feet,
strange to fingers that touch the walls uncertainly

as I walk through the dark of it at night.
Outside, different trees, different stones on the path.

Closer to death I want to know great faith and great doubt.

What no one taught me, that’s what I want to remember,
immersed like Blake, his inner eye

a storehouse for the infinite
flashings the fontanel let in, before it knit the bone door shut.

I have always been alone, and I have never been alone.

What I used to call the self is a windowing of light
in the flood plain of the boundless. 


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