The Book of the Stories We Tell About Our Lives

Laura Hope-Gill

There is only one:

of the night and its vast holdings

how the rivers have crashed in our sleep.

We might tell ourselves

it was something different:

the moonlight’s shadow of a raven on a cliff.

But it was really only time

to do the one thing that would

nearly kill you. Time to decide if you wanted to live.

There is the story

of the love, and there is the story

of the ways love left: how you could watch

a door in a faraway country

and hope it would enter again.

There were cliffs. There were drinks.

You slept on the roof

over the sea or in the soft white bed

with the view through the window of a mountain learning

In its hold. You turned

only as much as it would allow.

You have been bound to it, even on the trains.

The night, in the end,

will have been good to you.

When you return to it for good

All you did to escape from it will be there.