Here is a very brief poem written
as an elegy for a little girl who used to skip rope.
I had to rewrite this poem about 25 times which fact I mention
not to brag about how hard I work,
but to suggest that very often when you start writing a poem,
some of us in the combined graduate poetry workshops
were talking about this last night.
I think you don't necessarily know what you're doing.
And I certainly did not know what I was doing.
Well, I knew that somehow there was something
similar between the little girl skipping rope
that the circles of the skip rope and the circles
of the Earth as it turns.
It seemed to me as if in a way all of us
who are alive on this Earth are doing something
like skipping rope every day.
That is if the Earth is circling us or circling
like a big skip rope and we are skipping,
we're trying to get over something.
Each night we try to get over the night.
We go to sleep and in the morning
the Earth is there beneath our feet again.
And so we keep skipping over the nights again and again
and again until finally we get tripped up.
Something like that, but it took a lot of versions
to work this out into any clarity,
and I'm not sure it ever became completely clear.
Little Elegy.
Here lies resting out of breath, out of turns
Elizabeth, whose quicksilver toes not quite cleared
the whirring edge of night.
Earth, whose circles round us skim
till they catch the lightest limb,
shelter now Elizabeth, and for her sake trip up death.