poetry
January 1st, 2010 | Issue sixty-eight

Second Person

by Rae Armantrout
Share

Second Person

Rae Armantrout
Facebook icon Share via Facebook Twitter icon Share via Twitter

Lemons, lanterns
hang late
into the evening.

But you are known
for your voluptuous retreat,

for leaving
your absence
on the air,

illicit, thin.

I know
you think
I wonder
if you think
of me.

This reflection
spins,

a bead on a string.

I can take it with me.

contributor
RA
contributor

Rae Armantrout has published fifteen books, including Conjure, Wobble (a finalist for the National Book Award), Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015, and Versed (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award). She is the current judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. A new collection, Finalists, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in March 2022. Armantrout is a professor emerita at the University of  California, San Diego. 

More by Rae Armantrout
More Reads
Poetry

I Am Astonished at the Sunflowers Spinning

Derek Walcott

I am astonished at the sunflowers spinning in huge green meadows above the indigo sea, amazed at their aureate silence, though they sing with the inaudible hum of the ...
Poetry

There Never Really Was a We or Ours

Derek Walcott

There never really was a “we” or “ours,” whatever each enjoyed was separate, a drizzle’s drift, the slant of arrowing showers on a hot road, on roofs, made them elate, but ...
Poetry

The Deathbed Version

Scott Zieher

Local Boy Finds Rhyme with Orange—Door-hinge! Loses Fight for Life in Hospital. As we go to press—last minute news from East to West—Canadian student kills the infamous ...
More