You play this game slowly before falling asleep.
Each tries to make the softest, barely audible sound,
And it is about all that you could never say.
Next to a person you love, face up to face,
Start audibly at first, the sound’s made with your tongue.
You play this game slowly before falling asleep.
The room is swallowed in darkness, but what lies beneath?
Quietly above, the vault of stars moves round,
And it is about all that you could never say.
You held her, said you loved her, but she walked away;
Outside stones lie buried deep beneath snow.
You play this game slowly before falling asleep.
Whatever does not occur is yours, forever, to keep.
The stars are no one’s mirror. Say window, say home,
And it is about all that you could never say.
Listen long enough and what was color becomes sound.
Against the enormous dark, her small face remains blonde.
You play this game slowly before falling asleep,
And it is about all that you could never say.
Mark Irwin is the author of eleven collections of poetry—including Joyful Orphan (University of Nevada Press, forthcoming 2023) and American Urn: Selected Poems (1987–2014) (Ashland Poetry Press, 2015)—and the essay collection Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry (Peter Lang, 2017). His poetry and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, AGNI, Harper’s, The Nation, and elsewhere. He has received, among other honors, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He is professor of creative writing at University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and the mountains of rural Colorado. Read a 2013 interview with Mark Irwin. (updated 10/2022)
Read Monika Cassel’s review of Irwin’s “Vertigo” in the folio “AGNI 96 Reviews AGNI 96”