Introduction Ennui (text of poem)
Acknowledgments Typescript of Ennui (final draft)
Contributor’s notesvia kathleenjoy
Emma expects to be confined in March, a period I most devoutly wish over.
Charles Darwin, Letter to Fox, January 25, 1841.
Honestly, Charles has worn me out.
I won’t be sorry to find my bed.
He can whine more than fat little William.
With his misery of headaches and chills,
how did he survive Rio Negro
and Cape Horn? His father was deadset.
The sea looks shiftless on a resume.
Charles claims our House is ugly, brags
about 15 acres, quinces, plums, Spanish-chestnut
and old larch, nine miles from Knole Park.
Cook says I’m carrying a girl. We’ll name her Anne.
Neighbors drop carcasses - dogs and cats -
in our foyer, and Charles cheers them on.
I dreamed Annie was a ruby, burning to the touch.
Take from my palms, to soothe your heart,
a little honey, a little sun,
in obedience to Persephone’s bees.
You can’t untie a boat that was never moored,
nor hear a shadow in its furs,
nor move through this life without fear.
For us, all that’s left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.
Deep in the transparent night they’re still humming,
at home in the dark wood on the mountain,
in the mint and lungwort and the past.
But lay to your heart my rough gift,
this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees
that once made a sun out of honey.
via poetry365
The Solitude of Night
It was at a wine party—
I lay in a drowse, knowing it not.
The blown flowers fell and filled my lap.
When I arose, still drunken,
The birds had all gone to their nests,
And there remained but few of my comrades.
I went along the river—alone in the moonlight.— Li Po
Upstairs that night, my mother and sister and I
piled the bedroom bookshelves against the door
and stood with our backs pressed there, waiting
to hear my father and brother fight him off.
But we heard nothing. We heard his footsteps —
first up the staircase, then right outside. The door
shook against a shelf and knocked a glass
jar of coins to the floor. Jackpot. And then
Mimi and I really started screaming. I remember
pounding against the windows, seeing all the docked
boats flashing in the harbor, the rows of headlights
easing their way across the bridge. Nowhere near us.
Along the Chesapeake Bay, maybe a woman sat in a car,
resting her head on her husband’s shoulder. All she saw
when she looked towards us was a blank square of brightness —
not my sister, trying to shatter the window with a lamp.
Lately, I feel like that all over again. Even crowded
around the table at lunch with everyone. Like my friends
are drinking soda while I’m sipping gasoline. My teeth hurt
from remembering. My throat hurts from not telling.
