Another poem from "Essential Love":

The Knowing by Sue Ellen Thompson

The night before the final exam,
I stand in her doorway, my arms filled
with laundry still taut from the line.
High school is almost over, everything
littering her room is broken or ending:
the cupped stubs of candles,
the wilted root-hairs of a cactus
spilled on the sill in a scattering of sand;
the confetti that's left when notes are torn
from their bindings speckling the carpet
like so many used-up stars.
She sits in a cross-legged slump on the floor,
her baseball cap pulled down low
and her Baudelaire propped open
with a shoe. If she needs
my help, she's not asking. When she

was in seventh grade, I bought her
Les Chateaux de France at a bookstall in Paris.
Night after night we sat propped in her bed,
one of us reading until she came
to an unfamiliar word and the other
looking it up in the old blue Larousse. By the end
of that winter we knew the word for corbel
and truss, portcullis and finial
and crenelation. Between us we had
all the knowledge we needed to live in a world
whose walls contained everything
worth desiring. I lay the clothes

in a fragrant heap at her feet. Without looking up,
she aims the remote at her stereo, clicks,
and a chorus of angry voices erupts
all around us. When I was her age,
I would study hard up until bedtime,
then close the book, knowing
there was a point beyond which the facts
could not take me. So later that evening,
when her light goes out, and I turn out mine,
together we enter that time when all
we can know of each other is already
inside us, and who can conceive
a word for what lies ahead?