Room in Antwerp

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Dust covers the window, but light slips through—
it always does—through dust or cracks or under doors.

Every day at dusk, the sun, through branches,
hits a river's bend & sends silver slivers to the walls.

                        No one's there to see this. No one.
But it dances there anyway, that light,

        & when the wind weaves waves into the water
it's as if lit syllables quivered on the bricks.

        Then the sun sinks, swallowed by the dark. In that dark
more dust, always more dust
                        settles—sighs over everything.

There is no silence there, something always stirs
not far away. Small rags of noise.

Rilke said most people will know only a small corner of their room.

I read this long ago & still don't know how to understand
that word only, do you?

                        Where are you? I think of you so often
and search for you in every face that comes between me & dust,
me & dusk—first love, torn corner from this life.

Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs

As usual, Death sweetly slips her arm in mine—
& we take a deep breath from the eucalyptus breeze.
We both worked honestly at our jobs: all day Death
destroyed traffic with wailing ambulances while I killed
hours & lines on eight-&-a-half by eleven inch pages.
We’re fast friends by now, Death much older of course,

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

2022

Rooms Remembered

I needed, for months after he died, to remember our rooms—
some lit by the trivial, others ample

with an obscurity that comforted us: it hid our own darkness.
So for months, duteous, I remembered:

rooms where friends lingered, rooms with our beds,
with our books, rooms with curtains I sewed

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

2015

Stillbirth

On a platform, I heard someone call out your name:
No, Laetitia, no.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing,
but I rushed in, searching for your face.

But no Laetitia. No.
No one in that car could have been you,
but I rushed in, searching for your face:
no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

No one in that car could have been you.
Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen.
No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two:
I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen:
I was told not to look.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

2007

Poems

Room in Antwerp

More by this poet

Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs

Rooms Remembered

Stillbirth

Poems

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Room in Antwerp

More by this poet

Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs

Rooms Remembered

Stillbirth

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