I Shall Be Released

What we love
     will leave us

or is it
      we leave

what we love,
     I forget—

Today, belly
     full enough

to walk the block
     after all week

too cold
     outside to smile—

I think of you, warm
     in your underground room

reading the book
     of bone. It’s hard going—

your body a dead
     language—

I’ve begun
     to feel, if not

hope then what
     comes just after—

or before — 
     Let’s not call it

regret, but
     this weight,

or weightlessness,
     or just

plain waiting.
     The ice wanting

again water.
     The streams of two planes

a cross fading.

I was so busy
     telling you this I forgot

to mention the sky — 
how in the dusk

its steely edges
     have just begun to rust.

Kevin Young is the author of five books of poetry, most recently For the Confederate Dead, nominated for a Quill Award. He is Atticus Haygood Professor and curator of the Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.

Read more poetry from Kevin Young in the Summer 2008 issue of The Kenyon Review.