print previewback SUSAN ELBE
Loose Page Found Inside a Notebook
Another shark day, gray loneliness, not solitude,
circling. Another year the lilacs never opened.
A catch in the breath—home doesn’t exist anymore.
The least heartache could set me back 15 or 20 years.
I sleep more now with my hands fisted the way babies do.
I’m preparing for the train wreck of my body.
I’m preparing to close away from the world.
Who can face the enormous empty
of no elephants humming one to another?
Who of us knows how to lose an ocean?
Or live without what the tiger carries deep in its bones?
Who can finally hold onto this wobbling Earth?
And yet when I disappear, it will be in the desert,
still trying to hold on, reaching down as ghost rain. 
Loose Page Found Inside a Notebook
Of Time and North