POEM
Sifting in the Afternoon
Some people might describe this room as spare:
a bedside table and an ashtray and an antique
chair; a mattress and a coffee mug;
an unwashed cotton blanket and a rug
my mother used to own. I used to have
a phone. I used to have another
room, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge.
I used to water my bouquet
of paper clips and empty pens, of things
I thought I’d want to say if given chance;
but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch
a particle of thought dote on the dust
and dwindle in a little grid of shadow
on the sunset’s patchy rust seems like enough.
Source: Poetry (November 2009).
This poem originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Poetry.
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Malachi Black is literary editor of the New York Quarterly and a James A. Michener . . . MORE »
