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 Contents | October 2002 More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. Also by Jonathan Musgrove: Crayfish Hunting (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.
Jonathan Musgrove is a poet, a teacher, and a poultry farmer living in Long Shop, Virginia. Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; October 2002; Her Last Night at Home; Volume 290, No. 3; 130. |
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