Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Early Morning Considerations after a Night of Rain

There you are, first light freckles in the curtains
with dawn while the jay insists: It’s six. Six!
It’s six — as if I don’t know that.

Good morning, welcome, new Thursday. I arc
the blankets away. The dog sheds gladness all
around me as war news shrapnels out of NPR.

Outside, everything is still gleam & green after
the first rain in months, & petrichor — a word some
poets sequin into their pastorals — left in the wind.

Petrichor! I imagine a starched table & gold candles
as erect-pinkied connoisseurs sniff a Zin & a guest
highbrows: I adore a good pertichor.

It’s not in my vocabulary of choice. Give me
glad-deep-earth-breath instead, & for rain
try window-ticklers, coat-soakers or  .

I could go on & on, & I do, actually — aloud,
but alone. So I’ll stop here, but not before telling
you what word makes me want to enunciate each

of its syllables like an adoring aubade: it’s sempiternal.
Sem-pi-ter-nal. I want it to be the final word, so that
when the last bomb or virus, burned-down city or black-

cloaked day are done being done, sempiternal — perhaps
charred, soaked or scarred — will clear its throat, shoot
a root, try a trill, jump start a new heart, & reign.

 

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Walking Home from the Store

The dog won’t even pull at the leash anymore:
we’re both tired from the uphill hike. The day
runs out of light behind an old sycamore. From
neighbors’ homes the kitchen jingles I love:
cymbals of silverware drawers, a lid’s tap dance
on a pan. Silhouettes shift against TV flickers.
The dog & I are the only ones left in the street
now, & it comes to me that we could be a perfect
image in a Tranströmer poem: an old widow
& her black dog in a dusk-dark street. But just
as we enter our house, the new moon smiles her
bright grin through the kitchen’s open window,
& the mockingbird finally breaks into one of his
delirious nocturnes — pure & zealous & breathless.

 

 

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Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Small Gods of Grief, winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize, and of A New Hunger, selected as a Notable Book by the ALA. Her latest collection These Many Rooms was published by Four Way Books. She taught at Sarah Lawrence College, and UCSB. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and of the James Dickey Poetry Prize for 2020, she edited five anthologies, and served as Santa Barbara’s Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021.