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Joyce Sutphen

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What the Clouds

All white and inside this room of moonlight –
my bones, my ashes, my small white headstone.

You point the camera and we are gone,
ages long ago, as in a storm. Keats

would have loved us and we him. Listen, you
hear the wind withdrawing … and then again,

and what I was hoping was that your luck
would change, that it would bring us together.

Perhaps some other life (there are others)
will let us stop when we pass each other

in the airport (this has happened before,
hasn’t it?) instead of being swept on,

away – always away – from each other,
and there you stand, waving, as I ascend.

Joyce Sutphen’s collection, Coming Back to the Body (Holy Cow! Press 2000), was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award and Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press 2004) won a Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. She is one of the coeditors of To Sing Along the Way, an anthology of Minnesota Women Poets from the Territorial Days to the Present, forthcoming in Autumn 2006 from New Rivers Press. Currently she teaches literature at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

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