Carol Frost

Moon

Grief again, the turntable left on
and the needle set at the beginning
of our song before the rebuff, you gone

back to your life. The lopsided moon sings
outside on the trellis its style of song,
and I can hear, ghostly, the little rhymes

that rhyme with sad. I haven’t the heart
to close the blinds. They stay as they are left.
Shadows pile in the corners, a part

of the night, the speckled air adrift
and filling with the soft valley mist
for morning. I call it my season

for misery, like watching winter come,
cold rain blown, hardening into snow,
then lasting too long. When rain trickles from

the eaves, I’ll go where least shadows
lie, moon-tossed, at the garden end, a sparrow
in the tree with its three notes, and hear him.

CAROL FROST is writer in residence at Hartwick College, where she directs the Catskill Poetry Workshop. Her latest collection, Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems, was published by Northwestern University Press.

“Moon” appears in our Autumn 2001 issue.

return to top