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Billet-Doux

By Chris Forhan b. 1959 Chris Forhan

For S. S.

She reads by the light of a guttering candle

and likes the feel of each page's gilt edge

as she lifts it slightly at the corner, readying

herself to turn it. If the wind whips

the sycamore branches outside her window,

if her nightgowned shoulders shudder once

from a sudden chill, so much the better,

and the book must tell of children toiling

for bread and pennies in a textile mill,

or tender brothers doomed to sharpen

their bayonets in opposing armies,

or a family of refugees, dust

in their mouths, gazing with longing at the far

shore of a river. And I long only

to be the author of that book she reads

whose page glows from the same dim

flame that illuminates her face,

the author whose thought she contemplates

as she touches a fingertip to a word

to mark her place and turns her head

toward the kettle that has begun to whistle.

Source: Poetry (July 2000).

Biography

Chris Forhan grew up in Seattle, Washington. He earned an MA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. He is the author of Forgive Us Our Happiness (1999), co-winner of the Bakeless Literary Publication Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars (2003), winner of the Samuel Morse French Poetry Prize; and Black Leapt In (2009), chosen by poet Phillis Levin for the Barrow . . .

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