Spy Poetry: Room in Antwerp by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Editor’s Note: How carefully and lovingly this room in Antwerp is observed—how the light plays on the walls and dust settles over everything, much the way time sifts silently down over our lives, dimming the past and the lovers we left there.

Room in Antwerp by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Dust covers the window, but light slips through—
it always does—through dust or cracks or under doors.

Every day at dusk, the sun, through branches,
hits a river’s bend & sends silver slivers to the walls.

No one’s there to see this. No one.
But it dances there anyway, that light,

& when the wind weaves waves into the water
it’s as if lit syllables quivered on the bricks.

xxxThen the sun sinks, swallowed by the dark. In that dark
more dust, always more dust
xxxxxxxxxxxxxsettles—sighs over everything.

There is no silence there, something always stirs
not far away. Small rags of noise.

Rilke said most people will know only a small corner of their room.

I read this long ago & still don’t know how to understand
that word only, do you?

Where are you? I think of you so often
& search for you in every face that comes between me & dust,
me & dusk—first love, torn corner from this life.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar was born in 1943. She grew up in Belgium and moved to the United States in 1987. Fluent in four languages, she has published poems in French and Flemish and translates American poetry into French and Dutch poetry into English. She is the author of These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019); A New Hunger (Ausable Press, 2007); Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions, 2001), which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry; and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (BOA Editions, 1997). As an anthologist, Bosselaar edited Never Before: Poems About First Experiences (Four Way Books, 2004); Outsiders, Poems About Rebels, Exiles and Renegades (Milkweed Editions, 1999), and Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City (Milkweed Editions, 2000). She coedited, with Kurt Brown, Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars (Milkweed Editions, 1997). This poem was included in LATELY: New and Selected Poems from Sungold Press (2004) and is posted here with the author’s permission.