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By Suzanne Buffam

I am wearing dark glasses inside the house
To match my dark mood.
 
I have left all the sugar out of the pie.
My rage is a kind of domestic rage.
 
I learned it from my mother
Who learned it from her mother before her
 
And so on.
Surely the Greeks had a word for this.
 
Now surely the Germans do.
The more words a person knows
 
To describe her private sufferings
The more distantly she can perceive them.
 
I repeat the names of all the cities I’ve known
And watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home.
 
What does it mean to love the life we’ve been given?
To act well the part that’s been cast for us?
 
Wind. Light. Fire. Time.  
A train whistles through the far hills.
 
One day I plan to be riding it.


Suzanne Buffam, "Enough" from The Irrationalist. Copyright © 2010 by Suzanne Buffam.  Reprinted by permission of Canarium Books.

Source: The Irrationalist (Canarium Books, 2010)

  • Activities
  • Living
  • Relationships

Poet Bio

Suzanne Buffam
Suzanne Buffam was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. She earned an MA in English from Concordia University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. About Buffam's poetry, Gilliam Jerome, writing of Past Imperfect in Canadian Literature, identified “a speaker self-consciously wary of mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.” She teaches at the University of Chicago. See More By This Poet

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