Mary Jane White
From the countryside
To wait out the term
To delivery. And return.
Quietly. Unremarked.
To go through rehab
And then return. To town.
Going to Toronto —
An old way of speaking
In front of you . . .
Who recall how it was:
In the countryside,
A suicide . . . Gone to
Toronto. No return.
For Michael Andre
November 18, 2017
 
Mary Jane White: MFA Iowa Writers’ Workshop, NEA Fellowships (in poetry and translation). Tsvetaeva translations:  Starry Sky to Starry Sky (1988) New Year’s, an elegy for Rilke (Adastra Press, 2007); Poem of the Hill (The New England Review); Poem of the End (The Hudson Review), reprinted in Poets Translate Poets, (Syracuse 2013).