Monday’s poem comes from Mark Strand over a Slate. Strand was United States Poet Laureate during 1990-91. He won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “Blizzard of One”.

The poem is austere and spare yet is simply evocative. Is Strand conjuring the spirits and ghosts of our imagination? Perhaps not. These “[l]overs of the in-between” are more likely to be the creative misfits who shy away from attention and who don’t conform to our societal norms. Bloggers perhaps?

[div class=attrib]By Mark Strand for Slate:[end-div]

You’ve seen them at dusk, walking along the shore, seen them standing in doorways, leaning from windows, or straddling the slow moving edge of a shadow. Lovers of the in-between, they are neither here nor there, neither in nor out. Poor souls, they are driven to experience the impossible. Even at night, they lie in bed with one eye closed and the other open, hoping to catch the last second of consciousness and the first of sleep, to inhabit that no man’s land, that beautiful place, to behold as only a god might, the luminous conjunction of nothing and all.

[div class=attrib]Listen to the author read his poem at theSource here.[end-div]