Poetry
A Little Night Music
April Lindner
issue four
Typewriter shrouded for the night,
I stepped from steam heat into streets
already dark. From Haymarket Station
the bus set out, telling its rosary
of too many stops. Lurch by lurch,
our feet thawed and the air
grew pungent. Not a soul
looked up from newspaper or knitting
though by then we surely recognized
each other’s faces. Last passengers
borne toward rented rooms in a costly
seacoast town, its widow’s walks
trained on the blank Atlantic,
we paused for a stoplight
and I saw her, framed
by the library’s dark glass,
blue Victorian lady,
hair caught in a chignon,
playing her piano
(not a librarian entering data
in cold computer light).
Gliding unseen past
so many lit windows, I believed
she must be lingering on the margin
of a world she could never re-enter,
steeped in a lavender tisane,
soothing her longing with a sonata
I could in all my silence almost hear.
About the Author
I’m the author of two poetry collections—Skin (winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Prize from Texas Tech University Press) and This Bed Our Bodies Shaped (Able Muse Press). I also have edited or co-edited anthologies, including Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Paraclete Press), Contemporary American Poetry (Penguin Academics) and Lineas Conectadas (Sarabande Books). I have written three novels, Jane, Catherine, and Love, Lucy, (Poppy). I teach writing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and live in Stockton, New Jersey.
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