The Suitor
By Jane Kenyon
We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.
Poet and translator Jane Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor in 1947. She earned both her graduate and undergraduate degrees from the University of Michigan, where she met poet Donald Hall. The two writers married and moved to rural New Hampshire. Kenyon published four books of poetry: Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978), where "The Suitors" comes from. Her translated title is Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985). Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate when, in April 1995, she died of leukemia. Graywolf Press has published three posthumous books by Kenyon: Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1996), A Hundred White Daffodils (1999), and Collected Poems (2007). Donald Hall wrote two books about Kenyon: the poetry collection Without and the prose work titled The Best Day, The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon.
Comments