#MIDDLEBURY
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.
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
About 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.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Noah Warren. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
