Anson County: Poems

Of evenings, Joan, especially in the later months, took to bed quite early. Left to myself, with hours before I'd sleep, I wrote at night by candlelight in our dining room, the old poker parlor. For two or three hours, occasionally more, I'd work in a heat until urged from the room by a faint rustle behind me, what seemed like eyes at the window, or the congregation of ghosts I imagined marching across the winter wheat at my elbow. Perhaps by sitting in that charged room, in a ring of candles, writing about the house, its former occupants, and the countryside it had been hidden in for years and years, I had all along been invoking ghosts. What I was certain of was that I found a book of poems, Anson County, shaping under my hand. A book informed muse-like by the spirit of the dwelling, my sleeping pregnant wife, and the mystery of our unborn child.