Moving On in the Dark Like Loaded Boats at Night, Though There is No Course, There is Boundlessness by Lucie Brock-Broido
Moving On in the Dark Like Loaded Boats at Night, Though There is No Course, There is Boundlessness
Lucie Brock-BroidoMaster, then This—I crossed my father’s gate.
Once, I walked into the northern lakeDazzled by the lubricious feel of old botched
Leaves. When he died, he went on like a loadedTrout stream—toward a Body larger than this one
Is, wading hip-high in the loadedDark of boneless water, moving On.
After Pennsylvania, I couldn’t breathe.Why would what died once keep on dying off
Over & over like a seam in an old velvet coat?Every night I am the same brilliant fluke
Rising from my bed like a cut-Throat trout listening for Trick, not
Moving, bound—& if you die of air as WellThe stream will sew itself shut—my lodengreen gills
Will be rouged past Recognition in a vein of metal ore.When the boat leaves the lake stacked with odd
Amphibians tinned in salt, the metaled lidsWill glint like zippers, marlin,
Stars. In this half-lured life allNight long I will listen for you, loaded
Like an ark, Boundless, VoidOf course—moving On.
How long how on how oft how long.
SELECTED BY EMILY SKAJA
This gorgeous elegy is from The Master Letters by Lucie Brock-Broido, a poet I’ve always admired for her lush music and lyric intensity. Her poems are vivid and strange, with startling imagery and language that seems to drip with old magic.
Twenty years ago, my college roommate & forever bestie Katie Schmid introduced me to this poem. Ever since, I’ve felt haunted by the poem’s central question: “Why would what died once keep on dying off / Over and over like a seam in an old velvet coat?”
ABOUT EMILY SKAJA
Emily Skaja is the author of Brute, winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her second book, Black Lake, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2026. She is the founding editor of the Poetry Prompt Generator, and she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in The Master Letters by Lucie Brock-Broido, published by Knopf, 1995. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“The title of this richly textured book derives from two of the three mysterious letters left by Emily Dickinson–the ones addressed to “Dear Master.” Lucie Brock-Boido has imagined a series of letters echoing devices found in Dickinson’s own work. “We feel we are in the presence of something entirely new, ” says Bonnie Costello in The Boston Review. “Not even Brock-Broido’s wonderful first book, A Hunger, prepares us for this bold encounter.”” (Source)
ABOUT LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO
Lucie Brock-Broido was born in Pittsburgh, was educated at Johns Hopkins and Columbia University, and taught at Bennington, Princeton, Harvard (where she was a Briggs-Copeland poet), and Columbia. She was the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as awards from the American Poetry Review and the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Her collections, A Hunger (1988), The Master Letters (1995), Trouble in Mind (2004), and Stay, Illusion (2013), which… (more)
Read more poems by Lucie Brock-Broido • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 24 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: night • body • movement • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
