Photo by pedram ahmadi on Unsplash.
I wrote these two poems a little over ten years ago and recently rediscovered them while browsing through an old notebook of mine. You can probably guess where I get a lot of my inspiration from…(hint: he’s haunted by a talking raven.)
***
After Elinor Wylie.
One night I lay sleeping–
My thoughts were all still–
The moonlight was steeping
The blank windowsill–
A figure bent o’er me,
Bent o’er my dark bed;
I saw him before me
Through eyelids of lead–
He burned through my dreaming–
I had to return
From the nebulous gleaming
Of roses and fern,
Of heartbreak and laughter,
To swallowing night–
To dark that comes after
The forces of light–
A villanelle.
An empty chair now haunts this quiet room
Beneath the window where the shadows cling,
Where cloud-swept curtains billow in the gloom,
And dull the pallid light that does illum
Vermilion cloth in wrinkles gathering;
An empty chair now haunts this quiet room.
Its emptiness with an astringent bloom
A memory of one does softly bring,
Where cloud-swept curtain billow in the gloom,
As if from some strange grave they did exhume
One I had loved and buried, sorrowing–
An empty chair now haunts this quiet room.
And I am caught in this collapsing tomb
Of memories that wound me with their sting,
Where cloud-swept curtains billow in the gloom.
The winds beyond the window cry and fume–
Within, the echoes of a phantom ring–
Where cloud-swept curtains billow in the gloom,
An empty chair now haunts this quiet room.
~H
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