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Column 861

URN

09.20.2021

Dori­anne Laux is one of our trea­sured poets. Her ele­gant poems grow out of the famil­iar. Urn” is beau­ti­ful­ly inven­tive in the way she con­nects the moment of uneasy child­like delight in the inex­plic­a­ble mag­ic” of a light switch (“I didn’t know/​where the light went”), with her strug­gle to face mor­tal­i­ty. Laux’s new col­lec­tion of poems, from which this love­ly ele­gy comes, Only as the Day Is Long: New and Select­ed Poems, appeared in 2020.

URN

I feel her swaying
under the earth, deep
in a basket of tree roots,
their frayed silk
keeping her calm,
a carpet of grass singing
Nearer my god to thee,
oak branches groaning in wind
coming up from the sea.

We take on trust the dead
are buried and gone,
the light doused for eternity,
the nevermore of their particulars
ground up, dispersed.
As a child I didn’t know
where the light went
when she flipped the switch,
though I once touched
the dark bulb that burned
my fingertips, studied the coiled
element trapped inside
seething with afterglow.

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2020 by Dorianne Laux, “Urn” from Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020.) Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.