Vox Populi
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Laure-Anne Bosselaar: The empty room I loved
The empty room I loved led to a larger one, where I lived. On the floor, by my bed, askew on a stack of books, stood my small transistor radio. It caught three stations: One was a pirate radio, broadcasting from a ship in the North Sea. The other, with Flemish news, only came on for two hours at night, & the one I listened to most was a classical music station. It played, uninterrupted, for an hour or more, then, after a minute or two of absolute silence, a woman’s exhausted voice came on. She must have been in her late eighties & constantly stumbled on musicians’ names. I can still hear her say “Rack-mun-num-nee-noff.” Every hour, the Cathedral of Our Lady chimed a while – then the treble bell rang the hour. I’d stand on a chair, lean through a dormer window to watch how Our Lady’s steeple pierced the light. Summer of ‘63. I was free, I was twenty. I fell wholly & forever in love every week. I was hungry for life & satiated by it, reading deep into the night, copying Sartre, de Beauvoir, Apollinaire, Gide, Rilke, Baudelaire, Sédar Senghor, Goethe, Rimbaud, & Lorca in my notebooks — barely sleeping before I rushed down to work, then ran back up the five steep flights to that white, lit room.
‘The Empty Room I Loved’ from These Many Rooms (c) 2019 by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
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Such a poem of time and stillness, of remembrance and the power of youth, of looking back not with longing or regret, but love. A poem that reminds us of the power of alone versus lonely. And what can come out of the privilege of being alone, when we need to at times, for then we are often connected to everything around us, as in this poem by Laure-Anne, a poem of a room, a poem Batchelard would praise, from her powerful new book that just dropped a year ago.
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Thanks for this eloquent praise of Laure-Anne’s poem, Sean. –MS
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I love this poem. But I love all of your poems! Thank you for their beauty and generosity.
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So many ways to let my mind wander with this poem. 1963. We have transistor radios in common. But what was I listening to? Folk music? Rock? Oh and I had a steady boyfriend then I have been unable to locate. At 17 I was still home and had yet to meet those writers. Perhaps I was secretly reading D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller. Interesting how another soul’s connection to a time pulls you there. I love this poem. Thank you.
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Thanks for this memory, Barbara!
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Lovely. I can identify.
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