The Atlantic | October 2002 | Her Last Night at Home

Contents | October 2002

More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly.

Also by Jonathan Musgrove:
Crayfish Hunting (2002)
The Atlantic Monthly | October 2002

Her Last Night at Home

by Jonathan Musgrove

.....

Hear the author read this poem (in RealAudio)

Her last night at home
she phoned, out of breath.
I was still half asleep
when she said, "There's a bird,
or a bat, loose in the house.
Please can you come home now?"

From outside I could see
the light in every window.
She met me at the door.
"It's behind the curtain
in the dining room, I think.
Something flew down the stairs."
She handed me a tennis racket,
and sat exhausted, thin, pale.

I looked everywhere: the cellar,
upstairs, in every window.
Nothing was behind the curtain
except the night, black,
full of morphine, and her house
flooded with all its lights,
reflecting back in the glass,
rooms unfolding one after another:
a long corridor to an empty kitchen.

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Jonathan Musgrove is a poet, a teacher, and a poultry farmer living in Long Shop, Virginia.