Emily Ransdell
Poetry
Emily Ransdell is the author of One Finch Singing, winner of the 2022 Lewis Award for Concrete Wolf Press and published in 2023. Her work has appeared in Rattle, New Letters, Tar River Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Terrain, and elsewhere. Emily divides her time between Camas, Washington and the North Oregon Coast, where she teaches poetry classes at the Hoffman Center for the Arts in Manzanita. www.emilyransdell.com
November Night
It’s no crime to sit in your armchair
after dinner just listening
to rain—the last dregs of wine
settling in the glass, dishes undone.
All day I stayed busy.
I polished the table with orange oil,
folded the clothes.
The sky grew thick and darkened,
dense as asphalt, deceptive as black ice.
I’ve lived so long
beside the ocean, my Ohio childhood
seems like someone else’s now.
I’ve listened to wind lament
in the hemlocks, praised the goodness
of spring as it loosened
the winter dirt again.
My parents are long dead.
What have I learned by living so far
from what I might have become?
Out here, the view from any random curve
in the highway might be the answer
to a prayer. November’s dark days
a scar that hurts as it heals.
Even pain is temporary.
I try not to want anything.
“ Despite how much I love the Pacific Northwest, where I have lived for forty years, the dark days and relentless winter rain can mess with my head. Sometimes it’s still hard work to accept it, to remember that winter is—like everything—temporary. The final line is borrowed with admiration from the poet Joseph Millar. ”