In the small hours
my past comes with me in lieu of my wife to bed
the nights nowadays become longer than I can sleep
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 14 November 1667.
Dave Bonta
SourceLicence:CC BY-SA 4.0
my past comes with me in lieu of my wife to bed
the nights nowadays become longer than I can sleep
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 14 November 1667.
Late at night, the speaker goes to bed, but not with his wife. Instead, his past gets in beside him. The phrase "in lieu of my wife" is the heart of it: something has taken her place. The poem never says why she is absent, and that silence matters.
Read the full summary