Gamine

Heart, be clean. Fists, be open, numb.
Most lovely

Lovely, let me be wrong in almost every
Thing. That the page is waste, all that rag

Content. That even despairing relentlessly cannot

Spare you what you fear the most.
Gamine, you are growing

Old now; it’s your time. If you wait here
For the noises of this night,

They will sound out as the rustling of autumn,
Spiky, dried of unctuous

Airs, blazing like a chestnut horse on fire in
The padlocked barn;
                                   It is time it will be time.

—Lucie Brock-Broido

Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of A Hunger, The Master Letters, and Trouble in Mind. She is the director of poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

Originally published in the February/March 2004 issue of Boston Review.