Deborah Pope

Deborah Pope is the author of the following collections from LSU Press--Fanatic Heart, Mortal World, and Falling Out of the Sky, Her book, Take Nothing, is forthcoming from Carnegie-Mellon Press. She has also won the Robinson Jeffers Award.

Late August

The lavender rinse of early sky is slowly
going to gold. From near trees come
the low notes of a mourning dove like breath
blowing over a bottle, the rusty bicker
of a jay. Neither the hummingbird
in the flame-heads of lantana or bees
deep in the scarlet mallow have left
for the winter that still seems distant.

This is the ripe hour—this balanced
tip of time, when light warms
the dew-damp grass, an hour when
the body feels strangely loosed
into spirit and spirit loosed into world.
I feel it hover here in the drowse
of summer's ending, before the kindled
forfeits of fall, the crimped and glittery
clarities that follow,
an hour asking its question
of what to yield to, and when.