Peter Grandbois: “The light is different, after”
THE LIGHT IS DIFFERENT, AFTER
The murmur of voices riven
from the earth where my shovel
digs beneath the sycamore
And my dog shoves his nose into
the hole as if he could scent
the tangled roots and echoes
And I stop my shovel from cutting
through because he paws the dirt
with such ferocity that I’m sure
he’s discovered something I can’t
see, something I didn’t want
to know, and I nudge him away
with my knee because I also know
he won’t stop until he breaks
a nail like he did the last time
when he bled all over the house
because we are all breaking and
because the door is opening and
because what we leave behind
sounds an awful lot like this.
Peter Grandbois is the author of eleven books, the most recent of which is The Three-Legged World (published as Triptych with books by the poets James McCorkle and Robert Miltner, Etruscan 2019). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio.