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Poet's Choice

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Cold air moved through the straw-

stuffed clapboards.

My eye drifted in the quiet dark.

The floor was breathing.

I stood there light as hay

dilating

my skin -- a man-o'-war's

after a sculler slits it

and the ink spills out.

The writer here is both alert and still: kneeling by a knothole in the dark beachfront charity house, feeling "light as hay" and "dilating" in some tactile way while visual awareness "drifted in the dark." That quiet, rapt attention has a lot to do with writing: The sunlight spills like "gilt/ on onionskin" -- which I take to mean both the actual skin of an onion and the thin paper named after it. And Balakian's final line, again using the verb "spill," brings Thoreau's astringent kind of whimsy to the writer's urge or need to write.

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