Poetry: Maxine Kumin

The Poem, the Poet:
Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Maxine Kumin is the author of Quit Monks or Die! (Story Line Press), a murder mystery about sensory-deprivation experiments on primates. Her 15th poetry collection, Jack and Other new Poems (Norton), includes works about man's relationship with the land.

Today

Apples are dropping
all over Joppa
a windfall, a bagful
for horses and cattle.–
Geese overhead

are baying like beagles.
The pears in the uphill
pasture lie yellow
a litter gone fallow
for stick pins of ground wasps.

The deer are in rut.
They race through the swales
and here on the marshy

spillway, a yearling
caught drinking, spies slantwise
two humans -- us, frozen
unbreathing, the same pair
who tracked him slobbering
apples today in
our Joppa back pasture.

-- Maxine Kumin