My Virtual Reading Room

Reminder

I am rich I am poor. Time is all I own.
I spend or hoard it for experience.
By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known.

Thrift is a venomous error, then, a stone
named bread or cash to support the pretense
that I’m rich. I am poor; time is all I own...

though I hold to memory: how spent time shone
as you approached, and the light loomed immense.
By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known,

though scars fade. I have memory on loan
while it evaporates; though it be dense
& I am rich, I am poor. Time is all I own

to sustain me—the moonlit skeleton
that holds my whole life in moving suspense.
By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known.

Ownership’s brief, random, a suite of events.
If the past is long the future ’s short. Since
I am rich I am poor. Time is all I own.
By the bitten wound the biting tooth is known.

(Marie Ponsot)

Fall 2016 saw the publication of Marie Ponsot’s wide-ranging and full-hearted Collected Poems. Born in 1921, Ponsot has written poetry in all weathers, often making the old forms new again. This villanelle is, indeed, a welcome reminder of what sustains us.