Oh Girl of the Bright World

for Toni Renee Long, October 30, 1962 — November 17, 2009


It’s night and the ceiling light
swings and everything
moves closer.
A bare lightbulb
all shadows and angles
reconfigures
this difficult and beautiful
world into
a place of bright permissions —
to come all this way,
and then as music?
Oh wild holy memory.
It was a long way to go.

The sky was dull,
the clouds rolled by
there appeared
a solitary bell-figure
wheeling
in a gate: it was Love
and it was distance:
first and long-forgotten
world of light
where pure forces shielded us
from distress
and the night
and we woke from that sleep
to verdancy’s harbor.

To know what makes
a moment, to know what moves
the calm abiding, to know
that only death releases
who you were and will be:
oh girl of the bright world
I have opened this door
to make a gateway
for joy:
as long as kindness remains
as long as dreams come true.


(the phrase “girl of the [wild] bright world”
from Cecilia Woloch’s poem “Bareback Pantoum”)