The Dark
I don’t so much see the dark
as taste it:
the bloom of rust
you get in your mouth
when you wake up late in a strange house
to a radiator’s tock and find
that everyone’s gone
and there in the steep
of the room’s still
you are not lost at all,
not lost but stopped
in the heft of yourself, in the ebb,
as a distant siren
makes the close silence thick.
Sam Bootle teaches French literature at Durham University, specialising in late nineteenth-century French poetry. His translations of Jules Laforgue feature in the anthology All Keyboards are Legitimate (2023), and he has also published his own poetry in Alchemy Spoon, Dreich, Francosphères and Mono.
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