linda pastan
why are your poems so dark?
Isn't the moon dark too,
most of the time?
And doesn't the white page
seem unfinished
without the dark stain
of alphabets?
When God demanded light,
he didn't banish darkness.
Instead he invented
ebony and crows
and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.
Or did you mean to ask
"Why are you sad so often?"
Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.
consider the space between the stars
Consider the white space
between words on a page, not just
the margins around them.
Or the space between thoughts:
instants when the mind is inventing
exactly what it thinks
and the mouth waits
to be filled with language.
Consider the space
between lovers after a quarrel,
the white sheet a cold metaphor
between them.
Now picture the brief space
before death enters, hat in hand:
these vanishing years, filled with light.