September
by Meg Day
Harder to say now which way it moved
& only that it idled at the green light
of my body, high-beam staring steady
at the sensor & my skin lit up like
Go. Hard to say if there was sun at all,
or just the thought of you, as afternoon
leaned my shadow right, then left
me in the shade. Mercy laid me down
last night & morning came anyway. Sorrow
stripped me green from sleep to keep
my one eye open. I stayed right here
despite the drive & even dreamt of stillness:
a sundial in snow. I left you last night the way
a station leaves a train. I left the light on anyway.
I like the private rumination available in a sonnet. Sometimes it feels like being alone, at last, in your own small room after a long ride on a crowded subway, or slipping into the bathroom to breathe a little鈥攃onfront the mirror鈥攁way from the sweet exhaustion of lively, smallish talk at a party that鈥檚 gone a little long. I like best the flexibility of the sonnet鈥檚 call & response; when I teach the form, we press into the space a volta can render, the distance it can put between one thought & another, one environment & the next. I like the way the sonnet allows me to play鈥攊n general, but also specifically鈥攚ith time & space.
When I wrote this poem, I was miles away from the room in which it occurs & farther still from the urgency I know this speaker felt. Sometimes, as poets, distance is a gift we can give ourselves. It makes it easier to access both specificity & simplicity; without it, I don鈥檛 think the grief of this scene would be allowed its soft revelry. There鈥檚 that Zora Neale Hurston quote about years that ask questions and years that answer. This poem is very much about a year鈥攁 month鈥攖hat did both. Without a little time & space, how could I have known?
Lately, I鈥檓 looking to renovate what I know of the sonnet鈥攖o ghost it, in a way鈥攕o much that most of its movement is the turn: meeting your own eyes in the mirror. In many ways, this poem is just that: one private, unaccompanied breath before returning to the party.
Deaf and genderqueer poet is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level, winner of the Publishing Triangle鈥檚 Audre Lorde Award. She is a recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in poetry. Recent work can be found in The Best American Poetry 2020 and The New York Times. Day is an assistant professor of English and creative writing in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.