for Marc, for helping me to remember

 

She slid like a seasoned ice skater,

her words marking perfect figure eights

as though they were the easiest thing to do

and for her, perhaps they were

 

She sent us Notes from the Other Side,

gave voice to melancholy or illness

so that we who suffer

could point to one of her poems, and say,

“There, there! Jane Kenyon felt it too!”

 

She reminded us that things could be Otherwise

as she did the Wash alongside us,

lifted the curtain and peeked inside our lives

and somehow recorded it all in the most glorious words

without leaving her farm in New Hampshire

”God, as promised, proves

to be mercy clothed in light”,

Jane Kenyon says,

and since she says it, it must be true