“I would not think to touch the sky with two arms” – Anne Carson, If Not, Winter
So what if I went there alone
just to prove that I knew how?
A gallery of thoughts
that were just thoughts;
so what that I kept each to myself
in my little dark vessel?
There is a loop that completes itself
when you speak aloud
and something listens, a yoke
that cannot be shown but I am telling you, I am telling
you. Up the staircase, on the top floor
was a room with a dark teak pew
on each wall and a square skylight,
of invisible glass, ceiling
miraculously open.
Warmth, the quiet air of a library.
A few strangers sitting within,
facing each other under the sky
with the universal patience
of waiting for someone to speak.
So what if no one ever did?
We saved ourselves.
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Caitlin Wilson is a Maryland poet. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, filling Station, Iron Horse Literary Review, Little Patuxent Review, McNeese Review, RHINO, Wildness, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she received 2021 and 2020 Graduate Poetry Awards. She is the winner of the 2022 Enoch Pratt Free Library Poetry Contest and recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project award and the Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award.