Requiem — Blackbird Archive

← v2n2, Fall 2003

It may have died of ghosts asking for companions

as in the old explanation.

A hawk moth tenting its wings against the house

today like a dusty suction,

a pleading for someone to move closer to the wall.

I found it dead the next day under the rocker.

A house is complete with comforts and intrusions,

beggings, circulations, rats.

And there are things next to us, transparent in the air

but thick as visions through an iris diaphragm,

puzzling as the last few blank pages in a book

when someone may have been distracted

and quit writing abruptly because they heard something

without saying everything, though there was room.

mortality nature solitude

Allan Peterson

Allan Peterson is the author of six collections of poetry, This Luminous : New and Selected Poems , forthcoming from Panhandler Books in 2019; Other Than They Seem (Tupelo Press, 2016), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Prize; Precarious (42 Miles Press, 2014); Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; As Much As (Salmon Poetry, 2011); and All the Lavish in Common (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Peterson’s work has appeared in AGNI , The Gettysburg Review , The Nation , and ZYZZYVA , as well as several anthologies. He is a recipient of fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the State of Florida. Peterson is a visual artist as well as a poet and previously served as chair of the Visual Arts Department and director of the Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts at Pensacola State College.