Alfred Nicol
Shelter in Place
There is an emptiness in everything,
like the shade cradled in the crescent moon.
A motorcycle’s engine, echoing
the large abstraction of an afternoon;
the broken gate that opens on a square,
the bricks and shadows rubbing elbows there
where silence lectures in its monotone;
another shade that walks the streets alone,
past windows—yes, the windows too are blank,
where people dwell inside their separate lives,
huddling there like money in the bank—
to where the river sheathes its glinting knives.
The tides have seized; the stillness is unreal.
The surface poses as a sheet of steel.
—Submitted on 09/26/2020
Alfred Nicol is the author of Brief Accident of Light: Poems of Newburyport (Kelsay Books, 2019), a collaboration with poet Rhina P. Espaillat; Animal Psalms (Able Muse Press, 2016); Elegy for Everyone (Prospero’s World Press, 2010), and Winter Light (University of Evansville Press, 2004), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. Nicol’s work has appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, Commonweal, The Hopkins Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Contemporary Poetry of New England (Middlebury, 2002), Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century (Dartmouth, 2014), and Best American Poetry 2018 (Scribner, 2018), among others.
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