"On the Night of the First Snow, Thinking About Tennessee"

Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee, and teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Sestets is the nineteenth book of poems.

On the Night of the First Snow, Thinking About Tennessee

It’s dark now, the horses have had their half apple,
                                                                      mist and rain,
Horses down in the meadow, just a few degrees above snow.

I stand in front of the propane stove, warming my legs.

If the door were open, I’d listen to creek water
And think I heard voices from long ago,
                                                     distinct, and calling me home.

The past becomes such a mirror—we’re in it, and then we’re not.

Excerpted from SESTETS by Charles Wright, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Copyright (c) 2009 by Charles Wright. All rights reserved.