[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Home
Current Issue
Back Issues
Premium Archive
Forum
Site Guide
Feedback
Search

Subscribe
Renew
Gift Subscription
Subscriber Help

Browse >>
  Books & Critics
  Fiction & Poetry
  Foreign Affairs
  Politics & Society
  Pursuits & Retreats

Subscribe to our free
e-mail newsletters




Contents | May 2002

In This Issue (Contributors)

More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly.
The Atlantic Monthly | May 2002
 
August Walk

by Rosanna Warren
 
 .....
 
audioear pictureHear Rosanna Warren read this poem (in RealAudio)


 The forest fungal, and a seethe of rain.
Indian pipes prod white, crooked fingers up through mulch,
boletus and inky caps glutton in the dank.
Lichen glues coral to moist granite.
We follow cleft hoofprints
of a bull moose, you striding ahead, I lagging;
you reading woods lore—ice-stripped bark, deer-nibble,
last winter's furry, matted fisher-cat spoor; I distracted,
musing. The soil springs at our tread, mossbanks
bristle with spores. Rainlight shivers down.
The felled giant sugar maple has broken out
in boles: baroque, all bulging eyes,
beaks, foreheads, claws, diseased
and dark as a mahogany Roman choir stall.
Off the moose path now, it's an old farm you seek:
rock piles from last century's sheepfolds;
inward-lapsing cellar hole;
a tumble where the chimney stood;
at the threshold, by the granite doorslab,
a cluster of weed-choked lilies sprouted from lilies
the farm wife planted before the Civil War.
The road is a soft cesarean scar in tufted grass.
Each rain-glossed leaf emits a stab of green.
Somewhere here survives the idea of home.


What do you think? Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
Copyright © 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; May 2002; August Walk; Volume 289, No. 5; 74.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Home | Current Issue | Back Issues | Forum | Site Guide | Feedback | Subscribe | Search