Once as often we
sat under the portico
and watched it snow. I
sipped scotch, you smoked your
Virginia Slims. We talked.
Headlights appeared and
rear lights disappeared
up State Street to Memorial
Bridge, invisible
over the river.
That will do, Memory! We
enjoyed it, that’s all.
Now in that dark I
see a togetherness, the
divine passing through.
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Author: Tom D'Evelyn
Tom D'Evelyn is a private editor and writing tutor in Cranston RI and, thanks to the web, across the US and in the UK. He can be reached at tom.develyn@comcast.net. D'Evelyn has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. Before retiring he held positions at The Christian Science Monitor, Harvard University Press, Boston University and Brown University. He ran a literary agency for ten years, publishing books by Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn, among others. Before moving to Portland OR he was managing editor at Single Island Press, Portsmouth NH. He blogs at http://tdevelyn.com and other sites.
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Oh, Toby! I miss her so, and I can see her in this poem.
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To me this is a deeply poignant reverie but it is also more. THe poem takes us as readers from the floating, whirling world of snow — perhaps a Romantic picture but the poem gives us clear impressions of th way the snow looked and not so much how the poet and his lover felt–to the intimacy of sahred breath, coversation, conviviality. The final lines create distnace not just temporal or spatial but ontological. THe poem and the poet let go, but in that release to me is not just a resignation to loss or a release of happy memories into nothingness but a distance of relation. The opening of time, aching memory, remembered love, is fecund as well as melancholy, perhaps allowing for communion with those who to all appearances are no more and yet the poem helps us be open to the reality that that may not be all there is to it.
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Jeeze Steve , that’s such a faithful commentary! I’m humbled.
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