Poem By Thomas Lynch

It’s bone cold tonight in Brooklyn, the snow has long buried the cars and the bikes. As I walked Dash home from a friend’s house, I thought about Andy Bachman‘s new post, how “I don’t feel lonely as much as I feel grateful for the odd proximity of Christmas Eve.”

Buried in the glimmering crystal, something of a prayer for those friends of mine who are struggling tonight.

A Clearing in the Woods

BY THOMAS P. LYNCH

You have come into a clearing in the woods
and want to live your life out, here, alone,
joyous and remote among the catbirds

letting the light fall on you and the shade
in hourly changing angles as a grace
endlessly descending among tree limbs

while growing in you is the will to grow
mindless of the niggling everyday
profusion of detail by which you know

uselessly the names and dates and shape of things.
After a while, you will begin to sing.
Harmless and plentiful you make the sounds.

Bent on nothing that does not bend with ease
you and your song rise in the leafy air
chancy as bass spawn in a mallard’s underwings.

Thomas Lynch, “A Clearing in the Woods” from Skating With Heather Grace. Copyright © 1986 by Thomas Lynch. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

(Thomas Lynch: Start with his book of essays detailing his work as an undertaker. Then I moved to his poems, beginning with the most powerful, STILL LIFE IN MILFORD.


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