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Maryann Corbett is the author of four books of poems, most recently Street View from Able Muse Press. Her poems appear widely and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Poetry Foundation website. She is a past winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award. One of her poems will appear in The Best American Poetry 2018.

Maryann Corbett

Late Intrusion

Bug-eyed, two a.m.
Strung out on caffeine, the screen,
and the world’s groaning,

I’m gripped by a stare,
slanting through the bedroom blinds:
cold-sharpened spring moon.

How should I reply?
First invoke Li Bai, although
our bed is not quite

his moon-filled river?
True, on our undulant sheets
and bodies’ ripples

stripes of moon tumble,
light so clean, so blunt the slats
lay down white slices—

Ah, but that’s Larkin
mooning for lost youth, and not
old Li Bai, drowning

in the moon’s embrace.
No, I’m cold sober, barred from
both those lost lushes:

Virtuous Sidney,
courtier, soldier, tracker
of the moon’s sad steps,

teach me to greet her
with your own graceful longing
(but a different plea,

since I lie beside
the very love you groaned for,
poor unsleeping soul).

— Maryann Corbett

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