Anniversary in the Lookout Tower

← v18n1, Spring 2019

You break a baguette, uncork a bottle

of Merlot, toast the sun bleeding through

the horizon’s blaze of trees.

I touch the topaz stars

around your neck, the amber moon

dangling at your ear.

From this perch, we can’t see

Sandy Hook, only its hills tilting

like gravestones down the valley.

You wave your cup and say

to a crow squawking on its pine branch:

You’d never do a thing like that.

Night dusts with pink the veined,

darkened clouds and now the luna moth

spiraling through the roof’s trapdoor.

It floats to my hand, clutches

my ring in its small talons.

You point to the golden eyes

ringed with black on its wings,

talk about souls flying out

from the mouths of the dead.

I lean over the tower’s barbed wire

fence and gently shake my hand.

The moth flutters into the shadows.

love mortality nature

Henry Hart

Henry Hart is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Familiar Ghosts (Orchises Press, 2014), and two biographies, The Life of Robert Frost (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) and James Dickey: The World as a Lie (Picador, 2000). His poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker , Gettysburg Review , Kenyon Review , New England Review , and The Southern Review , among others. He is the recipient of the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry and was named the poet laureate of Virginia in 2018. Hart is the Mildred and J.B. Hickman Professor of English and Humanities at the College of William & Mary.