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 Contents | March 2002 In This Issue (Contributors) More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. Also by Linda Pastan: Deer (1996) Crocuses (1989) Green Thumb (1985) Prosody 101 (1983) |
Rivermist: For Roland Flint
by Linda Pastan .....  Hear Linda Pastan read this poem (in RealAudio)When the kennel where my ridgeback died some thirty years ago wrote to ask for my business again, offering us one free night's board for every three nights paid, I looked at that name on the envelope, Rivermist, imagining they were writing to say that Mowgli was somehow alive, the swordlike blade of fur still bristling on his back; that he had waited all these years for me to pick him up. And though I've had four dogs since, a small one at my feet right now, each running too swiftly through his life and mine, I could have wept, thinking of rivers and mists— how in their wavering shadows they had prefigured and concealed the losses to come: mother and uncles, friends, and Roland now, so newly dead, who on the flyleaf of an early book once wrote, in his careful, redemptive hand: with love for Linda and Ira, and for Mowgli.
Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; March 2002; Rivermist: For Roland Flint; Volume 289, No. 3; 84. |
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