Faithful and Virtuous Night

by Louise Glück

Sometime after I had entered that time of life people prefer to allude to in others but not in themselves,

Who would call in the middle of the night? Trouble calls, despair calls. Joy is sleeping like a baby.

This is my home, he said. The city—the city is where I disappear.

I sensed the vanished words lying with their companions, like fragments of an unclaimed biography.

This concludes, as the stewardess says, our short flight. And all the persons one will never know crowd into the aisle, and all are funneled into the terminal.