Charles Bukowski

For Jane

For Jane - context Summary

Composed After Jane Coe's Death

Charles Bukowski’s "for jane" is an elegy linked to the death of Jane Coe, his long-term partner and muse; it appears in The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills and is dedicated to her. The speaker registers physical and emotional depletion, with images of life drained away and past hours of love lingering like shadows. Nights bring vulnerability and a sense of being stalked by inner predators. The poem moves from immediate loss to a resigned conclusion that what she was cannot recur and the speaker is left changed.

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225 days under grass and you know more than I. They have long taken your blood, you are a dry stick in a basket. Is this how it works? In this room the hours of love still make shadows. When you left you took almost everything. I kneel in the nights before tigers that will not let me be. What you were will not happen again. The tigers have found me and I do not care.

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