| Open Season by Judith K. Liebmann, Poet Laureate 2024 - I am sitting here in this sunlit room reading poetry in reticent acknowledgement of beauty and the clamorous image. But nothing is simple. The breakfast tray requires attention - sunlight overflows the grapefruit hull, egg-rests congeal. Outside my window, the sea heaves, washing up seaweed from last night’s squall. In the lee of Outer Island three men hunker down in a pod-shaped boat, around them decoys float like fallen leaves. The chill of stunted days and cooling nights brought scaup and golden-eye out of the north, rafting up to winter in the bay. The hunters followed, summoned in their season. Now a shotgun cracks a warning, and another. A cloud of sea-ducks rises up, reshapes and settles further out to sea. A golden dog, head tilted skyward, swims to fetch the fallen. On the table the book lies open to the stanza patterns of a poem by Roethke: the poet rides the glass roof of his father’s greenhouse, drunk with the power of a possible fall. I turn away, take up the tray, trusting that promises will keep held by sunlight and the open book. |
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