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Column 619

Thaw

Intro by Ted Kooser
01.29.2017

Fog car­ries mys­tery with­in it, and here’s a fine poem about a day in which a mem­o­ry approach­es through fog and makes itself real. Michael Lauch­lan lives in Michi­gan and his most recent book is Trum­bull Ave., (Wayne State Univ. Press, 2015). This poem appeared first in Cort­land Review.

Plows have piled a whitened range—
faux mountains at the end of our street,
slopes shrinking, glazed, grayed. Fog
rules the day. In woolly air, shapes

stir—slow cars leave a trace
of exhaust, careful walkers share
loud intimacies. My mother's birth
slides across a calendar. Like

a stranger who jumps off a bus,
crosses tracks and strides toward us,
memory parts the sodden gloom

of our winter, as though, today,
only she can see where she
goes and track where she's been.

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright© 2014 by Michael Lauchlan, “Thaw,” from The Cortland Review, (Issue 65, 2014). Poem reprinted by permission of Michael Lauchlan and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.