I washed a load of clothes
and hung them out to dry.
Then I went up to town
and busied myself all day.
The sleeve of your best shirt
rose ceremonious
when I drove in; our night-
clothes twined and untwined in
a little gust of wind.
For me it was getting late;
for you, where you were, not.
The harvest moon was full
but sparse clouds made its light
not quite reliable.
The bed on your side seemed
as wide and flat as Kansas;
your pillow plump, cool,
and allegorical. . . .
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“Alone for a Week” from The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon. Compilation copyright © 2020 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Jane Kenyon
Jane Kenyon was born in Ann Arbor and graduated from the University of Michigan. She published four collections of poetry during her lifetime—From Room to Room (Alice James Books, 1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (Graywolf Press, 1986), Let Evening Come (Graywolf Press, 1990), and Constance (Graywolf Press, 1993)—and a volume of translations, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (Eighties Press/Ally Press, 1985). She is the author of a posthumous collection, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1996). A Hundred White Daffodils (Graywolf Press, 1999) collects Kenyon’s essays, interviews, newspaper columns, and other work. Before his death, her husband, Donald Hall, selected The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon (Graywolf Press, 2020). Kenyon lived in Wilmot, New Hampshire, until her death in 1995.
