Poem of the Week

Marcus Wicker is the author of Maybe the Saddest Thing, selected for the National Poetry Series, and Silencer. His many honors include a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. Wicker serves as a visiting professor of English at Michigan State University.

Photograph by Elizabeth Randolph.

Incident with Nature, Late

by Marcus Wicker

Clean, the gust, prying
me open for the first time
this week—as I—
not exactly wind-
like in the running
thirty & already hunched
over after three stoic
blocks & one big sloppy
knock into the neighbor’s
knotty fence decide it’s
as good a place as any
to stop, pant
& smell the roses—
except there are no
roses, proverbial
or otherwise, except
a nondescript shrub
quivering
with what I hereby dub
the “piney-ness
of an Indiana March”

Want to read the rest?
Please login.
New to Narrative? sign up.
It's easy and free.
The password field is case sensitive. Account & Password Help.
Joining Narrative gives you FREE access to thousands of stories, poems and essays. It’s easy:
PLEASE ENTER A VALID EMAIL ADDRESS.
PLEASE NOTE: We are discontinuing our support of Microsoft-related addresses, including msn.com, live.com, outlook.com, and hotmail.com, and we ask that you use an alternative address, such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, fastmail.com, comcast.net, verizon.com, icloud.com, or other.

We have found Microsoft-related email addresses to be sometimes inconsistent in terms of delivering messages, and we want to make sure that you can access your account and reliably receive messages that you have requested.
Email Preferences
Email Preferences