The Imprint
We will count on these walls
to whisper
our resumes
to the strangers who take up
the work of these rooms,
forwarding them
past dust.
Our purpose shared,
suspended in trust
to a poem
that told us a long love
is willed.
Believing such
we are bound to exit
flattered
by our design,
unmindful that this thing
has also always
been lying
in wait,
a thing
in itself, bossy and brutish
that has thrived in spite of
sabotage chapters
occasional giddy
neglect.
A volition
apart
that exceeds
dull need
a self-interweaving
imperative be mine
that will whisper
our love
past dust.
Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Moxley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 5, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
“For many years my husband and I have read William Carlos Williams’s poem ‘The Ivy Crown’ to each other. In that poem, Williams writes of love: ‘We will it so / and so it is / past all accident.’ My poem ‘The Imprint’—the form of which is a modified version of Williams’s ‘triadic foot’—questions the idea that long love is willed. Yes, love demands some measure of will, but I have come to believe that love is also something else—a force or imperative that can catch you in its drifts and thrive, even against your will. As if love is an instinct, like imprinting, that we can’t help but to follow. ‘The Imprint’ is also about my belief that emotions can ‘imprint’ the spaces we inhabit and the objects we care for.”
—Jennifer Moxley
Jennifer Moxley
