In chapter five our text described the Story. In The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry I looked for a piece that was like a story. The following piece I believe is a story of a journey. The protagonist I believe are the parents and in the piece they are missing a child who has gone to school. Then the piece shifts to a memory of the parents in their earlier years and how the only loss they knew then was the loss of each other. The piece is very interesting and I think the author was using a sort of story telling voice which made it even better.

The Empty Room

by Sue Ellen Thompson

Unable to sleep, my husband gropes
for his reading glasses and book.
He tiptoes into our daughter's room-
the bed freshly made in the wake
of her leaving for college, the windows
stripped of their curtains for washing-
and draws back the dinosaur sheets,
slipping into the cresent shape of her absence.
I think of him there:
middle-aged, the gray with its fingers
laced deep in his beard, little half- glasses
crouched low on the ridge of his nose.
Just before dawn, I go to him,
lowering my body into his
backwards, pressing my shoulder blades
into his chest, my hips
into the hollow of his, the curve
of my calves against his hard shins,
lashing my body to his as I did
in the tumult of our twenties, when all
we longed for was an end to the storm,
when all we knew of loss was to turn
in the night and find the other one gone.