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Fugue
Susan Blackaby

August stillness seeps
into the landscape, its
menacing blessing and spooky
solace a counterpoint to

the peaches’ peachiest season,
the ospreys’ screechy disagreements,
the shards of daylight shed at dusk.

I’m fine

to fix on the fixed star of October,
to fall well past the shadows
cast on memory’s stone—eroded
by the slipstream of time,

by the insistence of physics,
by sorrow’s quick and shifty winds
kicking up cats’ paws on the river,
rustling the balsam root.

—
Susan Blackaby is an Oregon children’s book author and winner of the 2011 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. Dabbling across genres in children’s literature is familiar ground; wandering beyond those boundaries is a relatively recent and uncharted adventure. Her work has appeared in The Gold Man Review and VoiceCatcher.

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