Among the many silences in my family was the silence surrounding the stillbirth of my parents’ only son, an “Irish twin” born before me.  His ghost surely haunted each of us in our own ways—it certainly haunted me—but we never spoke of it. I seem to write poems about what I cannot talk about. Both my title and the line quoted in the close of the poem are taken from Louise Gluck, whose work lives within me.

Patricia Wallace splits her time between the landscapes of the Hudson River Valley and the high desert of Santa Fe.  Some of her poems and essays on poetry have appeared in PEN America, bosque, The Iowa Review, The North Dakota Review, The Sewanee Review, American Literature in Transition 1960-1970, and The Columbia History of American Poetry.