Tender and Eerie: 'Death Comes to Me Again, A Girl' by American Poet Dorianne Laux

The best ghost stories combine a preternatural thrill with a palpable sense of melancholy — close, breathless, and mournful, filled with longing and loneliness.

This arresting poem also does the surprising: Dorianne Laux adds a touch of lightness that makes the sorrow both more manageable and more poignant.

Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl — Dorianne Laux

• Death comes to me again, a girl
• in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
• It’s not so terrible she tells me,
• not like you think, all darkness
• and silence. There are windchimes
• and the smell of lemons, some days
• it rains, but more often the air is dry
• and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
• built from hair and bone and listen
• to the voices of the living. I like it,
• she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
• especially when they fight, and when they sing.

About Dorianne Laux

Born January 10, 1952, in Augusta, Maine, American poet Dorianne Laux worked as a maid, gas station manager, sanatorium cook, and donut holer before earning a BA in English from Mills College in 1988. She was first inspired to write after hearing a poem by Pablo Neruda; this is a good Neruda poem.

Since then, she’s written 10 books and is currently a professor at North Carolina State University’s creative writing program. Her most recent collection is Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems; it was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2019.

In an interview, she said, ‘Craft is important, a skill to be learned, but it’s not the beginning and end of the story. I want the muddled middle to be filled with the gristle of the living.’ Read more poems by Dorianne Laux at PoetryFoundation.org.

Top image courtesy of Cody Board/Unsplash.