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Too Late to Stop Now
This week I dragged the Xmas tree out like a corpse
I was homesick for mutual assured destruction and 1985
Love was a meeting of solitudes, the thin tissue around ornaments,
Anne in the neonatal unit saving junk-sick babies
I drank oolong tea in bed, read DeLillo, had a neck ache
Let the Words of my Mouth and the Meditations of My Heart
I rocked some preemie babies, made new cells, a couple of poems
Suddenly, Anne in hospital, lymph nodes, margins, ten inches of snow
I didn’t take anything personally except when I did
My neighbors telemark skiing, bonfiring their vanities
Anne lost numbers, words, minutes, space, knitting needles, life
There was still a God, and the maple apple Bundt cake went stale
I realized everyone was my dead mother acting in a Beckett play
I accepted this week all previous weeks prepared me for
with its nervous dirges and the Tibetan Book of the Dead
I was still this Elizabeth and the soul who claimed this Elizabeth
This week love in my pantry, on my doorstep, on my tongue,
the ice caps kept melting, a terrible sun.
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Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, most recently Atomizer (LSU Press). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was chosen for “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker. Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues was published in 2019 in the U.K. Recent poems appear in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Women’s Review of Books, among others. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University.
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Author: Terence Winch
