Then grief came like the dog it was.
Chewing everything, grabbing it and shaking,
sinking its old teeth in. Old but durable,
capable of such maceration it was hard to recognize
the room for what it was. Books torn
open, the rug stained, table legs gnawed.
Because he lived before telescopes, Columbus stared so hard at the sea his eyes bled. He was tall, pale, so his skin burned. By the end of a voyage, he’d look like something crawled from the sea. I learned this from Martin Dugard, a writer on a panel discussion: Writing about History.
If she wrote to those she had wronged,
went down on her knees,
would that be enough to atone?
You must be doing something wrong.
Someone come back from the dead
to rebuke and, to endure.
Lynne Knight is the author of three full-length collections, Dissolving Borders, which won a Quarterly Review of Literature prize in 1996; The Book of Common Betrayals, which won the Dorothy Brunsman Award from Bear Star Press in 2002; and Night in the Shape of a Mirror, published by David Robert Books in 2006.