Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
Want more poems?
Subscribe to our
Poem-A-Day emails.
FURTHER READING
Poems by James Longenbach
Lake on the Hill
Orion
Second Draft
Related Poems
A Pot of Tea
by Richard Kenney
Back in Seaside
by Shanna Compton
only gray rocks with drifting mist...
by Rusty Morrison
Sponsor a Poet Page | Add to Notebook | Email to Friend | Print

Mist Valley

 
by James Longenbach

At the end of August, when all
The letters of the alphabet are waiting,
You drop a teabag in a cup.
The same few letters making many different words,
The same words meaning different things.

Often you've rearranged them on the surface of the fridge.
Without the surface
They're repulsed by one another.

Here are the letters.  
The tea is in your cup.

At the end of August, the mind
Is neither the pokeweed piercing the grass 
Nor the grass itself.  
As Tony Cook says in The Biology of Terrestrial Mollusks

The right thing to do is nothing, the place
A place of concealment,
And the time as often as possible.









Copyright © 2012 by James Longenbach. Used with permission of the author.
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2013 by Academy of American Poets.