DAVID KEPLINGER

At Hald Hovedgaard Estate

Whist
Always I think of wistfulness:
a word called woe-mood, Vemod,
in this language.

Woe-mood of the antique lamp,
antique light. A game by candlelight
and underneath the table

someone rests her knee against
my knee. In the dusk the bats
call back their high-pitched whir.

I keep thinking that we’ll have to stop.
It’s in the way we hold the cards up,
closer every hand, to our faces.  

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