Kelli Russell Agodon & Martha Silano
Passion for Solitude
after Cesare Pavese
I’m drinking cabernet by the sad doorway
because the moon is already lost, already
missing. Who’s going to organize the tides?
Probably the women because who else keeps
showing up to do the invisible work, the sweeping
of the shore, the tidying of the stars that no one’s
allowed to touch except the raccoons and porcupines
with their nimble, with their nibbling of the rinds.
Half a dose of silence, half a dose of still. All my fears
are blankets I lie across, are the leaves that keep falling
after a storm. All things in this afterlife, I can hold them,
the dead grasses beside the roadway, a shingle,
a plastic bag. Still I see a doorway in the branches,
want to open into it, open like the coldest night
in thirty years, like a coyote who speaks icicle,
speaks hunger through the broken willows.
Far and near, dark and yet these few stars having their say
despite the heavy clouds. Companionable rodents and canines,
they remind me I can walk for hours uphill in the deepest snow.
I’m drinking cabernet by the sad doorway
because the moon is already lost, already
missing. Who’s going to organize the tides?
Probably the women because who else keeps
showing up to do the invisible work, the sweeping
of the shore, the tidying of the stars that no one’s
allowed to touch except the raccoons and porcupines
with their nimble, with their nibbling of the rinds.
Half a dose of silence, half a dose of still. All my fears
are blankets I lie across, are the leaves that keep falling
after a storm. All things in this afterlife, I can hold them,
the dead grasses beside the roadway, a shingle,
a plastic bag. Still I see a doorway in the branches,
want to open into it, open like the coldest night
in thirty years, like a coyote who speaks icicle,
speaks hunger through the broken willows.
Far and near, dark and yet these few stars having their say
despite the heavy clouds. Companionable rodents and canines,
they remind me I can walk for hours uphill in the deepest snow.
--
Kelli Russell Agodon’s most recent book, Hourglass Museum (White Pine Press), was a Finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Julie Suk Prize in Poetry. Other books include The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice and Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room. Kelli is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press and Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women in Washington State.
Martha Silano is the author of five books of poetry, including Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. She also co-authored, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press, 2013). She teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA.