IN THE LAST QUARTER

She sat at the table under the small light.
Outside the window the moon rose huge and yellow,
slow, swollen, weighing down the night.

She turned the pages of a book, pages that
were dry and stiff; and the book's spine creaked each time
she moved her hand to hold them flat.

From somewhere a wind began to stir the room—
cups chinked softly on their hooks, in a vase the dusty 
flowers brushed together; soon

the shelves, the pots and plates, began to tremble
with the edgy aching sound of something about to break
and under the swaying lamp she could no longer tell

one word from another.  She put her head down,
one ear pressed on the book as if to listen, and watched
leaves twist across the floor, drift into mounds

around her feet and up against the wall;
leaves swirling and falling till the room was lost in them
and their rustling whisper like the scurrying of small

animals or the parched voices of the dead.  And then
her eyelids fluttered, shut; and the wind also dropped,
sudden, and in the room everything fell silent.

The lamp hung above her, its shadow didn't change.
Her chair stopped creaking, and the leaves
lay deep enough to drown in; like tiny hands or flames

the leaves lay from wall to wall, high
as her waist, as the window.  Not a sigh.  Beyond the glass
the moon swept, bright and staring, into a frozen sky.

— Dave Calder

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Dave Calder's writings at
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All rights to this poem belong to its author.

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