Elegy — Blackbird Archive

← v21n1, Spring 2022

She squared herself like a shirt box.

In her skull, a cat stretched.

She smoked all night, one then

The other, whisky lighting her way.

In daylight, how would she not

Die early? The cat inside her

Sharpened her claws. One thought

And another began, a swell in open ocean

Like all the swells you don’t notice

Because they keep coming, that’s

What the sea looks like. Who understood

Beauty’s force as she did, for whom

Beauty was never a given? Who saw

Words make their meanings

At a distance, in sighs and ripples. In her

Angles the sea darkly glimmered, the sea

A cat who will never lie down, stretching

And curling while my friend stalked

Its shore watching, my friend

Who also will not lie down.

grief friendship mortality

Katharine Coles

Katharine Coles is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Ghost Apples (forthcoming from Red Hen Press, 2023) and Wayward (Red Hen Press, 2019). She is also the author of the essay collection, The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing (Turtle Point Press, 2021), and the memoir, Look Both Ways (Turtle Point Press, 2018). She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is a distinguished professor in the Department of English at the University of Utah.