Mud Season by Tess Taylor

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend January 25, 2016   Mud Season   Tess Taylor

We unstave the winter’s tangle. Sad tomatoes, sullen sky.   We unplay the summer’s blight. Rotted on the vine, black fruit   swings free of strings that bound it. In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields   grotesque extruded peppers. We prod half-thawed mucky things.    In the sky, starlings eddying. Tomorrow, snow again, old silence.   Today, the creaking icy puller. Last night I woke   to wild unfrozen prattle. Rain on the roof—a foreign liquid tongue.            Copyright © 2016 Tess Taylor. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “A few years back I had the chance to move out of Brooklyn and live in Amy Clampitt’s former home in the Berkshires for a full year. We moved in January, and the snow and the freeze were thick. One of the great surprises of getting to live in a rural area and watch its minute changes was the sheer noisy force of spring. The intense cracking and water noises during the first thaws, and the actually unsettlingly loud clatter of the first rain—all of this reminded me that spring has another deep meaning of ‘gush’ or ‘flow.’ By the time this poem was written, I was also working on a nearby farm a few days a week. I hope that the poem, and the book, actually, get at the bodily pleasure, but also the strangeness, of being so close to both the season and the work.” —Tess Taylor   Tess Taylor is the author of Work and Days, forthcoming from Red Hen Press in April. She reviews poetry for NPR’s All Things Considered and lives in El Cerrito, California. Poetry by Taylor   Work and Days (Red Hen Press, 2016) "Vespers" by Louise Glück "My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer" by Mark Strand "Botanica" by Eve Alexandra Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038