By Meg Stout

Old music. Winter

music. In the pond beside the treeline

see your face in the blurred whorls.

Elsewhere the narcissi poke

their bright heads, every known version

of yellow. Every imaginable bulb. Things

we breed in rainy seasons: mud, fog, deep

divots. I am afraid of all the unseen

places: wood rotten at dark

edges, the crumbling of an aggregate

wall. Listen, I want assurance

that the whole thing is not

a garden. That the future

is a lit home. Fill the feeder

and watch what comes.

Meg Stout’s poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Cimarron Review, North American Review, Zócalo Public Square, and the Portland Press Herald. A graduate of the MFA program at Warren Wilson College, she lives in Midcoast Maine.