Two Poems | Maya C. Popa | Granta

Two Poems

Maya C. Popa

An Elegist

You said the arc of things was always
towards their ends; all bows bend
towards goodbye. Light the violet
clung to vanished come December,
ships dissolved in their harbor’s pulse.
I had a patience no one would believe,
an aptitude for silence as the heart-
ambulance idled. I was a lighthouse
on a coastal skein. How could I deny you
what you’d hoped to suffer, seeing
what it was your hand had done, letting
go with one, holding on with the other.

 

 

 

 

Things

Things assume a sort of peace
if you accept life’s limitations.

That’s more or less the lesson
the beloved taught me

believing in collusions
of inanimate objects,

the knife twice broken
in his hand. Still, I miss him

knowing them, the things
I know, a poem by Housman

for this time of year
when the sun won’t gamble

past the horizon. And how,
May afternoons, he stroked

my palm and spoke of days
like this one, not this one.

 

Image © Ashok Boghani

Maya C. Popa

Maya C. Popa is the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (forthcoming from Picador in June 2023) and American Faith, winner of the 2020 North American Book Prize. Her pamphlet, Dear Life, was the winner of the 2021 PBS pamphlet competition. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, on the role of wonder in poetry. She is the Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly and teaches at NYU and elsewhere.

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