by Linda Gregg
"I sleep with thee, and wake with thee,/
And yet thou are not there," wrote Clare
from the Northampton Asylum in 1842,
nine years after his wife's death.
It fills me with tenderness,
the way the sun blots out everything
when it's too powerful. I think of
turning into the things around him.
A table, a chair. A windowsill.
Hieroglyphics that will take years
to read. To make the day rise
out of the heart's darkness.
