January 2024 - Elegy in Flannel and Cotton

The first, fresh days of any new year are bittersweet. They find us, like that image of the god of doorways, gazing both forward into a waxing, beckoning future and back into a waning past of joys and sorrows which still cling like fragments from a dream. . .

Elegy in Flannel and Cotton

Louise Elisabeth Glück (1943-2023)

by Anastasia Vassos

The poets are dying.

The bone ladder falls to dust---

escapes memory.

Once, when G & I drove up the coast

to Bangor, time forgot

its forward step, & there---

I wanted to make the moon

remain. The eye polishing

the night, astonished.

Now stars bloom myopic.

Nothing to be done.

We grow threadbare.

& I, still dressed

in flannel & cotton, drowsy

from last night’s tumbled sleep

read old words, those rivers

of ice whose work it is

to carry the crates of the dead.

Anastasia Vassos is the author of Nostos (Kelsay Books, 2023) and Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (Nixes Mate, 2021.) Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. Find her work in RHINO, Whale Road Review, Thrush, Comstock Review, Lily Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She speaks three languages, and lives in Boston. “Elegy in Flannel and Cotton" first appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, published by Kelsay Books.