Vox Populi
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Michael Simms: Evening in the Adirondacks
Always it will be late summer in your mind: Birches give off a full and dark light With a motion you know will abide and return Every evening. You are changed By small things: an elm seed spins To earth, and like your talent for the cello The possibilities remain enclosed. Being ordinary makes you a hero— Sweeping the porch, looking at the sky, You become more than yourself. The solace for being Dull is being perfectly at ease with the world. All afternoon The afternoon sails in and out the window, And the first star starts the lake singing. -- Copyright 2020 Michael Simms
From American Ash (Ragged Sky, 2020).
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“Dull is being perfectly at ease with the world.” This poem moved me deeply this morning. Thank you.
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Thank you, Lisa. I love your poems as well.
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❤️🙏
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I love this.
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Thanks, Arlene. I wrote this poem when I was 25 and living at Yaddo. A few years after I wrote this poem, my life fell apart, and I didn’t write again for decades. I barely recognize the young man who wrote these lines.
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Love this – sitting in the ADK’s as I read it. Wondering if/where you visited…..
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Patricia. Thanks! I lived in upstate NY for a while and drove through the ADK’s a number of times. I posted this 40 years later remembering the lovely summers there.
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Great poem, Michael. A killer last line! Charlie
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Thanks for these quietly evocative words. Bringing to mind (though in less articulated ways) times spent at Silver Bay on Lake George. Perhaps aided by the weather here in PIttsburgh these last couple of days. With the quiet peacefulness of what I have always known as Indian (Native American / First Nation?) Summer still ahead.
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