Today’s Poem: Here

Revisiting Rhina P. Espaillat’s catalogue of what remains

Maxim Vorobiev, Oak Fractured by Lightning, 1842 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Here

by Rhina P. Espaillat

Everything’s here, unused, but orderly,
as if ready for use: a mint or two;
his nail clipper; the little scissors he
trimmed his moustache with; scribbled things to do;
his watch; a neatly folded handkerchief
that spills a scattering of change; the pen
that leaked into his pocket now and then.
I almost hear him now: Don’t touch! as if
I were pilfering his tangled hearing aids; 
this snarl of keys; his red Swiss Army knife
hiding its tiny arsenal of blades
like legs tucked under. Glasses, wallet, wife —
each item’s here. Though, useless as it is,
I don’t know why. Except that it was his.

                         (© Rhina P. Espaillat, 2017. Used by permission.)
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Rhina P. Espaillat published this sonnet, titled “Here,” after the passing of her husband, Alfred. And it is as precise a description of what remains after losing a spouse as anything English literature has to offer. It is a poem, in my own lingering grief, I can hardly bear to read and yet cannot bear to set aside.

After the death of Dylan Thomas, Caitlin Thomas published a 1957 memoir of her time married to the poet, with the unbearable title Leftover Life to Kill. Espaillat catalogues instead the actual leftover objects.

Rhina P. Espaillat

Born on January 20, 1932, Rhina P. Espaillat had her 90th birthday in 2022 celebrated by several of the better poetry publications. Back in its heyday, Prairie Home Companion featured her work. The godmother of the New Formalism — the counter-current that emerged in the late 1980s to offer alternatives to the endless free verse of modern college writing-program poetry — she occupies a section in every contemporary anthology of rhymed and metered verse.

The authorized translator of Robert Frost into Spanish, and the translator of such works as the poetry of St. John of the Cross into English, Espaillat is a major poet working in our lifetimes. Which is why we’ve featured her work several times here in Poems Ancient and Modern: the comic “Undelivered Mail,” the dimeter of “Things That Go,” her translation of “Songs of the Soul in Intimate Amorous Communion with God.”

And in “Here,” the reader will find several of the features that recur in her verse. The sonnet form she often uses. The simple rhymes, for example, that do not strain for effect. The list-making. The precise observation of “his red Swiss Army knife / hiding its tiny arsenal of blades” and the near personification of those knife blades: “like legs tucked under.” A refusal of hyperbole: “I almost hear him say . . . ” And a powerful emotion never named but completely expressed, with the unbearable ending:

. . . Glasses, wallet, wife —
each item’s here. Though, useless as it is,
I don’t know why. Except that it was his.

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