Elegy in Flannel & Cotton
Louise Gluck, 1943 – 2023
The poets are dying.
The bone ladder falls to dust—
escapes memory.
Once, when G & I drove up the coast
to Bangor, time forgot
its forward step. & there—
I wanted to make the moon
remain. The eye polishing
the night, astonished.
Now stars bloom myopic.
Nothing to be done.
We grow threadbare.
& I, still dressed
in flannel & cotton, drowsy
from last night’s tumbled sleep
read old words, those rivers
of ice whose work it is
to carry the crates of the dead.
Previously published in The Orchards Poetry Journal