WEBVTT

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Here is a very
brief poem written

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as an elegy for a little
girl who used to skip rope.

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I had to rewrite this poem about
25 times which fact I mention

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not to brag about
how hard I work,

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but to suggest that very often
when you start writing a poem,

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some of us in the combined
graduate poetry workshops

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were talking about
this last night.

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I think you don't necessarily
know what you're doing.

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And I certainly did not
know what I was doing.

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Well, I knew that somehow
there was something

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similar between the
little girl skipping rope

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that the circles of the
skip rope and the circles

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of the Earth as it turns.

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It seemed to me as
if in a way all of us

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who are alive on this
Earth are doing something

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like skipping rope every day.

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That is if the Earth is
circling us or circling

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like a big skip rope
and we are skipping,

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we're trying to
get over something.

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Each night we try to
get over the night.

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We go to sleep
and in the morning

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the Earth is there
beneath our feet again.

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And so we keep skipping over
the nights again and again

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and again until finally
we get tripped up.

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Something like that, but
it took a lot of versions

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to work this out
into any clarity,

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and I'm not sure it ever
became completely clear.

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Little Elegy.

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Here lies resting out
of breath, out of turns

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Elizabeth, whose quicksilver
toes not quite cleared

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the whirring edge of night.

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Earth, whose circles
round us skim

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till they catch
the lightest limb,

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shelter now Elizabeth, and
for her sake trip up death.

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