Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.
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) and 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.
Discover more from Vox Populi
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Laure-Anne,
This poem of yours originally appeared in Vox before I started reading the daily offering. So only now have I had the opportunity to sit with it. Remarkable words, as usual, from you.
Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of Pam’s death. Last night, In her memory, I wrote a poem partially about the candle I lit near the end, and of the memories of how its light played on the wall by her bedside. Reading your poem today spoke to me of something similar, though more complex. I’ll place the two poems side by side for awhile, and see what happens. That exercise may stir some new ways for me to express my love for her and her life, now having been inspired by the intricacies of your light: ablaze or embraceable “by the night’s wide open arms.”
LikeLike
As usual, Laure-Anne Bosselaar knocks us out as much as with what’s said as with what’s implied. How I admire and adore her work– it’s been one of my writing life’s biggest inspirations since her first book in English, The Hour Between Dog & Wolf, was published in 1997. What a treasure she is!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, I love that book as well, Meg. Thank you.
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dearest Meg — thank you!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t know if it is a gift or a curse, but I am awed for the first time again. Fred 14 years gone, the siren, the neighbor, the loss, the light.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sometimes words fail me. Beautiful isn’t strong enough.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Sent from my iPhone
<
div dir=”ltr”>
<
blockquote type=”cite”>
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s a lovely poem. Thanks much for the chance to enjoy a reading moment.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I love the economy and depth of feeling in tye poet’s work.
LikeLiked by 3 people
‘the’ not tye
LikeLiked by 1 person
Beautiful elegy from a stunning book. ________________________________
LikeLiked by 3 people
indeed.
>
LikeLiked by 2 people
*…from days of yore…
LikeLiked by 3 people
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.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thanks, Ed.
>
LikeLiked by 3 people
How wonderful that you worked with Richard Hugo …thank you for your kind comment.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Lovely x
LikeLiked by 2 people
Lovely, terse in the best of poetic ways. Wow.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks, Jerry. Laure-Anne is a beautifully subtle poet.
>
LikeLiked by 2 people
Laure-Anne, that ending image–“the night’s wide open arms”–opens the poem to all the darkness and beauty of the world.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Gracie mille, dear Barbara — welcome back from that deliziosa trip!
LikeLiked by 1 person
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.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, beautiful. Life curled up in death’s arms.
>
LikeLiked by 3 people
Sweet, sad poem. Well made. I especially like including the old guy raking leaves next door and the ambulance wailing off.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thanks, John. I agree. A well-made poem. Sweet and sad.
>
LikeLiked by 2 people
I feel blessed to (re-)encounter this, L-A!
LikeLiked by 2 people
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.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I always say the only book I’d take would be poems by Laure-Anne, and then I thought, yes! But which one…So I picked out the backpack with room for all her books, and that felt about right. I never tire of reading her work. She captures what I need to feel.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am in awe.
LikeLiked by 3 people
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 ✨
LikeLiked by 3 people
“Negotiate with silence” what a lovely phrase, my friend.
>
LikeLike
Stunning Laure-Anne. Stark and beautiful. (Carla Schwartz)
LikeLiked by 3 people
stark and beautiful. yes.
LikeLiked by 2 people
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.
LikeLiked by 5 people
I agree!
>
LikeLiked by 2 people
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.
LikeLiked by 8 people
lovely paean. Thank you, Sean.
LikeLiked by 2 people
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.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I feel the same way, Noelle.
>
LikeLiked by 2 people