Cattail History by Noah Warren

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend December 14, 2016   Cattail History   Noah Warren

The lake dry; it seethes. Rust creeps through brittle reeds, seeps into the rustling seed-heads— one stalk bows beneath the weight of the blackbird's feet.   From the path edge the fat lizard barks, a silent croak. He pivots, sprints over sticks, plunges into shallow hole.   His dull eyes glowing in the hole—   The late heat spreading, prickling the inside of our faces—   an earth crumbles away around us, scales dropping from the eye.   And I love you, and I think time is mind— our heads globes of unsifted time.   A disc of mist floats up, brightens above the live oak.   Far grass tips wave, bend, flow. The doom is in their roots too— but it is still so early,   the sky is still stiffening to a blue so dark and clear I shiver   to shake a finer silence from its skin.            Copyright © 2016 Noah Warren. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "As spring turned and the hills went yellow, I kept going back to walk around the empty lake—the grass there kept its color a month after everything else had withered. Then it went too. I couldn't quite convince myself that life would return; it felt like a foretaste of the greater change. And this was the world in which a love poem seemed possible, even necessary." —Noah Warren   Noah Warren is the author of The Destroyer in the Glass (Yale University Press, 2016). He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco, California.   Photo credit: Ana Flores Poetry by Warren   The Destroyer in the Glass (Yale University Press, 2016)  "The Night Migrations" by Louise Glück "If a Wilderness" by Carl Phillips "The Epistemology of Rosemary" by Geffrey Davis Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.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

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