Weekly Poem: ‘Where Shadows Will’

By Laura Moriarty

                        for Norma, again when

Full night but bright
Scans wide
Pans back
Often rarely we
As now at table or
Together in our heads try
Not to hide
We don’t die

Until a long time later. We meet. I read your book. Each new
line. I get lost in the familiar words. It’s win win or lose lose.
This is the last contradiction. As if I had control over that.
Over these. Aloud. Now. Here. There. You declare.

“Not to be seen is to be dead”
But I say
This death is in your head
It’s my turn to pay and you
That I already
And why not
Have paid

Or will see
A shadow where
Space left
Everything out

When the negative
A positive for
Another
Taken literally not

For granted
Yours or mine also not
You alive now my love
And I know

Laura Moriarty is the author of 12 books of poetry, including “A Tonalist” (Nightboat Books) and “A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975-2007” (Omnidawn), as well as the novels “Cunning” (1999) and “Ultravioleta” (2006). She is the deputy director of Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, Calif.

The video above was filmed at AWP’s 2011 Conference & Bookfair in Washington, D.C. Special thanks to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.

Camera and audio work by the NewsHour’s Crispin Lopez and Kiran Moodley.