Two Poems

Elisa Gabbert


Life Poem 2

Beginnings of years, each random thing
is an augur. I sleep unwell, is that
life now? Make tiny adjustments
to furniture. Poem is a four-room house.

We walk several miles, see many animals
at the zoo. “What the living do”:
they pace around, eat, content enough
to be bored. A moon bear. A Bactrian camel.

This elephant stands there so casually,
one back leg crossed. She’s 39.
She’s younger than me—she
so enchanted/entrenched with time.

I want time that deep. A trench,
an intractable arrow. I want not
to know what I want, I want to
want nothing past tomorrow.

Caravaggesque

There’s a scene in The Hustler
you once heard described in another movie.
There’s a hole in the future, hope
rises up, hope you don’t want.

Years pass. You see The Hustler. The scene
floats out from the screen
like a soul leaves a body, a memory
of someone else’s dream.

Sunday now, train in the mist,
you look at the cars on the other bridge.
Is life always like this—doubled,
removed, and thus understood?

As in a famous painting of
the Magdalen, her candle positioned
to watch itself flame in a mirror,
which also is framed, it also is paint.

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Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self, Normal Distance, and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays. She writes the On Poetry column for tThe New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.