The Reader

But now it is she who pauses,

As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking.

—from “The Writer” by Richard Wilbur

I’m the girl behind the door in Richard Wilbur’s poem,

typing in solitude. Confinement frees me

from my family. The sentences I make are blades,

the brash clatter of the keys a song: I’m getting out.

Wilbur invented this scene of writing: the daughter,

the typing, the shut door, the linden that tosses

against the window, the bird as metaphor, his own paused

self interpreting her keystrokes as a kind of war.

What does he know of her writing and its causes?

But now it is she who pauses

to question my intrusion in her home. How can I compare

myself to her? No. I’m the parent, listening on the stair

to the rhythms that my daughter makes. I long

to hold her captive in the house of words I’ve built

to keep her safe. Instead, I must open the casement,

brace myself for the coming, necessary rupture.

It arrives with all the breathless grace and power

of the prisoner released. I watch her as she turns

away from me and strides into her future,

as if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

I’m the bird in the room, the frightened starling

fluttering hard against the window glass. Wild,

he called me, sleek and iridescent. Yes. I fled too early

from my parents’ house and recognized too late

that grief would lodge like fire in my throat,

that I’d be haunted and bewitched

and typing hard through every night. And now,

in a house of books, with neither parents nor child,

where the doors lock, and the clock ticks,

a stillness greatens, in which

I’m only the reader of this poem. It cuts me twice,

with its escaping and its letting go. This morning

news of Wilbur’s death comes hard in the frozen

dark, and I reread “The Writer,” a poem in which

I’ve lived for forty years, as I live in this house—

alone and typing, sometimes drinking,

while the stillness swells in the cold air, filling

the empty rooms until there’s no sound anywhere.

Only winter closing in, and the mercury sinking.

The whole house seems to be thinking.