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Enough by Suzanne Buffam

Enough
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.

MARGINALIA

Locking myself in a room.

ABOUT SUZANNE BUFFAM

Suzanne Buffam was born in Montreal and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. She earned an MA in English literature from Concordia University in Montreal, and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently A Pillow Book, which was named one of the ten Best Poetry Books of 2016 by The New York Times. Her other books are The Irrationalist, a finalist for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Past

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