Poem for the Recluses
In this poem Charles Darwin installs a mirror
outside his study window, so he can glimpse
visitors making their way up his driveway.
And Shirley Jackson, ostracized
by the citizens of Bennington,
stays inside with her typewriter
and tranquilizers. Let us leave
Emily Dickinson in the company
of her hills, and her big dog, Carlo, pressing
ghost pipe into a thick herbarium.
Edward Gorey wears a long fur coat
and disappears into a Cape Cod cottage
where he collects doorknobs, and photographs
of dead Victorian babies, and daydreams
amid the raccoons who drift down from his attic.
JD Salinger publishes The Catcher in the Rye,
then slips into the woods
of New Hampshire and refuses
to give interviews, while Harper Lee explains
that it’s better to be silent than to be a fool.
Emily Brontë, thin and fevered,
avoids the poisoning doctors
and wanders alone through the marshes
that follow the bend of a glen
through the misty darkness
past chapel bells ringing
and a murmur of trees.
*
At Ninety-Nine My Grandmother Refuses to Put Away her Winter Clothes
When my aunt came to haul the winter clothes
up to the attic my grandmother folded her hands
in her lap and shook her head
for she did not want to pack away
all the winters of her life: her childhood in the Victorian
on Queen Street where the water froze in the basin
and a pot of oatmeal bubbled on a wood stove,
the night when my grandfather drove her home
from a New Year’s Eve party, his hand
in hers, the stars cold. She didn’t want to fold up
that first Christmas after the war when the pond
filled with ice skaters and a distant cousin played
Silent Night on an upright piano in the parlor,
or the one afterward, when she felt my mother
quickening beneath her ribs. She did not
want the season to change, did not admire
the whitening dogwoods or the papery petals
of the crape myrtles. The longer light,
she knew, was not for her.
*
The Realtor
His last name was Loveless and he had been married three times,
each of his wives dying young, leaving him
perpetually widowed. He was a patient, handsome man
who did not mind driving all day to see houses
we were unlikely to buy. He took us to see remote homesteads
and farmhouses with barns and cellars, ushered
us down shadowy, abandoned dirt roads.
When I tried to send him a Christmas card
the year after we signed our closing papers
I called his office and discovered
he had died. But that dappled afternoon
when he first showed us the cabin — the last
earthly realm where we would dwell together — we stood
in a living room with floor to ceiling windows
and looked out at the glittering valley and the outline
of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which were lush and green
by day but, at night, turned cold and bony
and floated in a lake of stars.
*
Across a Bridge
One night, when I was nineteen, I drove across a bridge
with both the men I would love
in my back seat, the Connecticut River slithering
beneath us. This was early winter — first snow
of the season blown over the road — and we were
on our way to eat pizza in a dark booth with a Wurlitzer.
These were the same streets I’d walk again as a widow
thirty years later — still winter —
as if there had never been any other season.
*
We Were a Bachelor and a Widow
We were a bachelor and a widow renting a studio
across from an inn that hosted weddings.
For two mild years, while we read Sebastian Barry
by lantern light and cooked fried fish with potatoes,
we watched brides and grooms come and go
until they became interchangeable — hydrangeas,
veils, towering ivory cakes, bridesmaids.
He never wanted marriage — that mingling
of money and love — and my own union had ended
sadly, in a windowless hospital room —
my husband’s wedding ring removed
by surgeons — and, still, men with champagne flutes
relieved themselves in our forest, and the big band music
went on, wafting out of the tent, in summer
and early fall, before the long darkness.
*
Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have appeared in: The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Her novel, Lost River, 1918 won the YA Global Fiction Prize and has been published in the US and UK by Leapfrog Press. A new novel, One Life on Land, won the Uplift Voices Award and is forthcoming in October 2026 from Jaded Ibis Press.