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.