Monday, November 27, 2006

How I love Jane Kenyon

This poem says it all. If I've been delayed with responding to your e-mail or phone call, now you know why...I'm stuck under the rubble.

Indolence in Early Winter

A letter arrives from friends. . . .
Let them all divorce, remarry
and divorce again!
Forgive me if I doze off in my chair.

I should have stoked the stove
an hour ago. The house
will go cold as stone. Wonderful!
I won't have to go on
balancing my checkbook.

Unanswered mail piles up
in drifts, precarious,
and the cat sets everything sliding
when she comes to see me.

I am still here in my chair,
buried under the rubble
of failed marriages, magazine
subscription renewal forms, bills,
lapsed friendships. . . .

This kind of thinking is caused
by the sun. It leaves the sky earlier
every day, and goes off somewhere,
like a troubled husband,
or like a melancholy wife.

--Jane Kenyon

2 comments:

E. said...

Great poem. I love Jane Kenyon, too. I need to read more of her. Do you know her poem "Pharoah"? That one always kills me.

Thanks for your kind comment over at Oral Hygiene Queen. From the looks of your blog, it seems we are kindred spirits in a number of ways. And Portland is my dream city. (Though I suspect if I lived there I'd have to work a damn site harder than I do in order to afford my life...)

Elizabeth said...

awesome poem. i can totally relate to that at this particular moment. except for the winter part - it's 80 degrees here today.