Vox Populi
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Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Widow’s Bedroom
Light puddles over the old floor planks, then climbs
the wall behind his place in our bed, & glows there.
Past noon, slow shadows douse that light & push it
out of the room. As if they knew he won’t come back.
Then reds & golds & grays ooze into the clouds’
great rooms, while dusk — all tact & hesitance —
loiters by the door — & for you, for me, for my old
neighbor raking leaves in his pajamas, & for who is
inside the ambulance yowling down the 101 —
light, dying, turns its back to me & curls up
into night’s wide open arms.
Copyright 2024. An earlier version of this poem appeared in These Many Rooms (Four Way, 2019).
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator, professor, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Lately: New and Selected Poems (Sungold, 2024) These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019). Her collection, Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions), won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger (Ausable Press 2008) was an American Library Association Notable Book in 2008. She is the author of Artémis, a collection of French poems, published in Belgium.
Vox Populi 
Sometimes words fail me. Beautiful isn’t strong enough.
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It’s a lovely poem. Thanks much for the chance to enjoy a reading moment.
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I love the economy and depth of feeling in tye poet’s work.
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‘the’ not tye
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Beautiful elegy from a stunning book. ________________________________
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indeed.
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*…from days of yore…
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Another gift from a great poet. Thank you, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, for this achingly beautiful heartbreaker. This is the alchemy that transforms grief into gold. Richard Hugo, my teacher from days ago, once said in class that while most mourners weep at the funeral, the poet is at home writing about it.
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Thanks, Ed.
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How wonderful that you worked with Richard Hugo …thank you for your kind comment.
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Lovely x
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Lovely, terse in the best of poetic ways. Wow.
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Thanks, Jerry. Laure-Anne is a beautifully subtle poet.
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Laure-Anne, that ending image–“the night’s wide open arms”–opens the poem to all the darkness and beauty of the world.
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Gracie mille, dear Barbara — welcome back from that deliziosa trip!
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Grace might be a good word for it– the place this poet always leaves us:
“…light, dying, turns its back to me & curls up into night’s wide open arms.”
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Yes, beautiful. Life curled up in death’s arms.
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Sweet, sad poem. Well made. I especially like including the old guy raking leaves next door and the ambulance wailing off.
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Thanks, John. I agree. A well-made poem. Sweet and sad.
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I feel blessed to (re-)encounter this, L-A!
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if I were alone on a desert island and I could take only one thing, it would be a sheaf of Laure-Anne’s poems. And this one in particular would keep me company for at least a month.
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I am in awe.
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Laure-Anne is a poet who truly knows how to negotiate with silence. What a finely rendered poem of dark and light, with its inner tremor of longing ✨
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“Negotiate with silence” what a lovely phrase, my friend.
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Stunning Laure-Anne. Stark and beautiful. (Carla Schwartz)
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stark and beautiful. yes.
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It’s not enough to say Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator, professor, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. Laure-Anne Bosselaar is an extraordinary gift to us all.
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I agree!
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Oh Laure-Anne:
These moments come—so completely put together—out of your being, there in the transcript of things from within you—we’ll call “Poem” as there is no better word but it is more even than that, made of so much more than ink and parchment and now we must all get ahold of ourselves because of what you’ve done.
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lovely paean. Thank you, Sean.
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all tact & hesitance — how much world in this line, in this poem, as always with your work, Laure-Anne. I can’t imagine my world without your poems. Thank you.
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I feel the same way, Noelle.
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