Tonight I Am In Love
by Dorianne Laux

Tonight, I am in love with poetry,
with the good words that saved me,
with the men and women who
uncapped their pens and laid the ink
on the blank canvas of the page.

I am shameless in my love; their faces
rising on the smoke and dust at the end
of day, their sullen eyes and crusty hearts,
the murky serum now turned to chalk
along the gone cords of their spines.

I’m reciting the first anonymous lines
that broke night’s thin shell: sonne under wode.
A baby is born us bliss to bring. I have labored
sore and suffered death. Jesus’ wounds so wide.

I am wounded with tenderness for all who labored
in dim rooms with their handful of words,
battering their full hearts against the moon.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek.
Wake, now my love, awake: for it is time.
For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love!

What can I do but love them? Sore throated
they call from beneath blankets of grass,
through the wind-torn elms, near the river’s
edge, voices shorn of everything but the one
hope, the last question, the first loss, calling

Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears.
Whenas in silks my Julia goes, calling Why do I
languish thus, drooping and dull as if I were all earth?

Now they are bones, the sweet ones who once
considered a cat, a nightingale, a hare, a lamb,
a fly, who saw a Tyger burning, who passed
five summers and five long winters, passed them
and saved them and gave them away in poems.

They could not have known how I would love them,
worlds fallen from their mortal fingers.
When I cannot see to read or walk alone
along the slough, I will hear you, I will
bring the longing in your voices to rest
against my old, tired heart and call you back.

“Tonight I Am In Love” by Dorianne Laux from Facts About the Moon. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

Today is the birthday of English poet John Clare (books by this author), born in Helpston, Northamptonshire (1793). The son of rural peasants, Clare published his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, when he was 27. He published it so that he could save his parents from eviction. The book was a great success and he was welcomed into London literary circles. But Clare, with his humble background, never felt like he belonged there, and once he became known as a writer, he never felt welcome among the laborers in Northamptonshire, either. He wrote, “They hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose.”

He wound up in a mental institution later in life and he wrote some of his best poetry from the asylum. His work there bore no trace of his madness. One of the doctors wrote, “He has never been able to obtain in conversation, nor even in writing prose, the appearance of sanity for two minutes or two lines together, and yet there is no indication of insanity in any of his poetry.” Clare died in the asylum in 1864.

There was a blackout in New York City on this date in 1977. Lightning struck three times that night, hitting Con Edison substations and shutting down the power grid. The city went dark at about 9:30 p.m. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports had to be shut down for eight hours, tunnels in and out of the city were closed, and thousands of people had to be evacuated from the subways.

There had been a similar blackout in 1965 and people had faced it with good humor, but in 1977 New York was in the middle of an economic crisis, and unemployment rates were high. There was also a serial killer, who called himself “Son of Sam,” on the loose, and the city was in the grip of a brutal heat wave. It was the worst time for a catastrophic blackout; the city was a powder keg.

In the 25 hours before power was restored, more than 1,600 stores were looted, more than a thousand fires were set, and nearly 3,800 looters were arrested. It was an ugly day in New York City.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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