Déjà Vu

by Richard Hoffman

As if a bird
alighted
on a mirror
a moment
and then was gone

(the name

“vireo”

arising
as the image
of the bird
rose
to the bird
but
more slowly)

so, from deep,

grief

is known
afterward,

when even a single
instant
matches it.

 

Richard Hoffman is author of the award-winning Half the House: A Memoir, and Without Paradise: Poems. His writing, both prose and verse, has appeared in AGNI, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Poetry, Witness, and elsewhere. He has been awarded several fellowships and prizes, most recently a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in fiction, and The Literary Review’s Charles Angoff Prize. He teaches at Emerson College and in the Stonecoast MFA Program. (10/2006)