In the Attic

 A browse in Donald Justice's Collected Poems seldom goes unrewarded. The other day I happened on this one. Perhaps it caught my eye because I had that day been obliged to climb up to my own attic (a far from poetical experience). 
  It's a poem suffused with the characteristic Justice mood of bittersweet (more sweet than bitter) nostalgic melancholy... 

In the Attic

There's a half hour toward dusk when flies,
Trapped by the summer screens, expire
Musically in the dust of sills;
And ceilings slope toward remembrance.

The same crimson afternoons expire
Over the same few rooftops repeatedly;
Only, being stored up for remembrance,
They somehow escape the ordinary.

Childhood is like that, repeatedly
Lost in the very longueurs it redeems.
One forgets how small and ordinary
The world looked once by dusklight from above...

But not the moment which redeems
The drowsy aria of the flies – 
And the chin settles onto palms above
Numbed elbows propped on rotting sills.

This apparently artless little poem achieves its effect through a complex pattern of repeated words (eight in all) at the end of lines: I make it 1234 2536 5768 7183. 
The poem is suffused too with a particular quality of light  – something Justice, a very painterly poet, is particularly strong on. Indeed it is the opening theme of one of the last, and most beautiful, poems he wrote. I've posted it here before, but it's a poem that bears returning to, again and again. It is, I think, one of the great short poems of the twentieth century:

1 
There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, this light,
  And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross
  Share in its charity equally with the cross.

2
Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
  I say the song went this way: O prolong
  Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

3
The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
  And all that we suffered through having existed
  Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.