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Parting Song

By Jill Alexander Essbaum

First

it is one day without you.

Then two.

And soon,

our point: moot.

And our solution, diluted.

And our class action (if ever was)

is no longer suited.

Wherewith I give to looting through

the war chest of our past

like a wily Anne Bonny

who snatches at plunder or graft.

But the wreck of that ransack,

that strongbox, our splintering coffer,

the claptrap bastard

of the best we had to offer,

is sog-soaked and clammy,

empty but for sand.

Like the knuckle-white cup

of my urgent, ghastly hands

in which nothing but

the ghost of love is held.

Damn it to hell.

Source: Poetry (June 2008).

Biography

Born in Bay City, Texas, poet and editor Jill Alexander Essbaum was educated at the University of Houston, the University of Texas, and the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest.

Influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simon Armitage, and Sylvia Plath, Essbaum’s poems bring together sex, divinity, and wordplay, blithely working with received forms and displaying a nuanced attention to rhyme and meter. Speaking to this unusual . . .

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