to astronaut: on fall
BY LISA FAY COUTLEY
Now love even leaves are surrendering
their last drops of water final burning
colors to the ground & now I can see
the house across our lake yet I cannot
wait another staring moment for snow
to hold still the birch branches to cover
the truth of these vigilant trees it’s more
than I can take our water is still blue
just deprived of light along the shoreline
deer tracks in sand are hearts cleaved & marching
not away I’ve built a blind from the dock
I pulled to pieces cross-legged & armed warm
to watch Moon rise bright rock at lake’s bottom
one more blurred surface that I cannot walk.
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award, and In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. Her poetry has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, scholarships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize. Recent prose and poetry have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and Poets & Writers. She is an Assistant Professor of Poetry in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Next (Kateri David) >
< Previous (Rob MacDonald)