“Toward what island-home am I moving”

by Joanna Klink

Toward what island-home am I moving,
not wanting to marry, not wanting
too much of that emptiness at evening,
as when I walked though a field at dusk
and felt wide in the night.
And it was again the evening that drew me
back to the field where I was most alone,
compassed by stems and ruts,
no light of the fixed stars, no flashing in the eyes,
only heather pared by dry air, shedding
a small feathered radiance when I looked away,
an expanse whose deep sleep seemed an unending
warren I had been given, to carry out such tasks — 
that I might find nothing dead.
And it was again the evening that drew me
back to the field where I could sense no boundary — 
the smell of dry earth, cool arch of my neck, the darkness
entirely within myself.
And when I shut my eyes there was no one.
Only weeds in drifts of stillness, only
stalks and gliding sky.

Come, black anchor, let us not be harmed.
The deer leafing in the dark.
The old man at the table, unable to remember.
The children whose hunger is just hunger,
and never desire.

— Poetry, November 2012

Joanna Klink’s most recent book of poems is Raptus (Penguin 2010). She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana-Missoula.