Elegy by Linda Pastan
I read this one in I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You. I know I’ve probably said it before, but Linda Pastan is amazing. Ever since a wonderful conversation with my poetry pals, I’ve thought about what actually constitutes a poem. In the conventional sense, it’s something someone has written down. But maybe it can also be an object or an event. I like Pastan’s take on it.
Elegy
By Linda Pastan
Somewhere a poem
is waiting for me
to write it: in the jewelry box,
coiled into an old ring
or stopping the hands
of a watch;
in the vanishing barn, risen
to the top of the pail
to be skimmed off;
or in the tree outside
engraved in green ink
on the underside of a leaf.
In my old room
the white curtains blow
like ghosts of themselves
over the sill;
under the bed misplaced words gather
to grab my helpless ankle.
It is a poem
the child I was hides
in the ear of the woman
I have become: a poem
whose lines were the lines
of my father’s face.
Thank you for this poem. I agree about Pastan, she never disappoints me.
The whole thing’s good, I think, but the second stanza is amazing: “it is a poem / the child I was hides / in the ear of the women / I have become …”