Six Weeks After

Maxine Kumin Click to read more...

kuminMaxine Kumin (1925-2014) was a novelist, essayist and poet, who also wrote many children’s books. A lover of horses and equestrian arts, she received many awards, including a Pulitzer in for Up Country in 1975. Her final volume, And Short the Season, was published in 2014 by W. W. Norton. "Six Weeks After" first appeared in Shenandoah 55/3.

two roistering dogs splayed me flat
on frozen turf shattering six ribs
consigning me to gray walls, bleak thoughts
I’m up and about, hitching from place to place

and I see the common coarse-grained stones
have not given up their good seats in the wall
though the deckle-edged daffodils came and went
while I motored my rented bed up and down

and I see the greening margin along the road
is shaggy and unshorn and the goldfinches
have exchanged their winter costumes
for strobic lozenges of yellow that brighten

the window feeder and an indigo
bunting has brought his electric blue
to my sphere so that each time the rose-
breasted grosbeak alights for a sunflower chip

I am stunned into wholeness, healed
by a wheel of primary colors.

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