Alice B. Fogel

NEARER

Even with that moon tonight low & bending
its light through glass                what approaches
my body is a darker matter:                   distances
act different now          neither cold nor holding
to appointed maps & zones:             hours & hours 
over years & years:        time & miles diffuse: 
it’s June again       it’s summer:     autumn:       late 

Even if there were no old pattern
to the longing      so long so constant       missing’s
gone adrift        shifted elsewhere         to where
someone                      has drawn on the horizon
of my skin         a signature in a lucid hand: heat
here:    & here             each stroke close now   
& low   as the moon’s light touches       this sill      

Alice B Fogel served as the New Hampshire poet laureate from 2014 through 2019, instituting a NH Youth Poet Laureate, among other projects. Her latest book is A Doubtful House. Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature & the 2016 NH Literary Award in Poetry, & her third book, Be That Empty, was a national poetry bestseller. She is also the author of Strange Terrain, on how to appreciate poetry without necessarily “getting” it. Nominated for Best of the Web & twelve times for the Pushcart, she has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She works one-on-one with students with learning differences at Landmark College, & hikes mountains whenever possible. 

Please visit her at : https://www.alicebfogel.com