American Seasons
A Poem by C.W. Emerson
August 1964, western New York State: walking the furrowed deer tracks out beyond the lip of the woods on our way to play at Sonnenberg Park— we believed those paths were Indian trails worn into the dirt, dividing the trees, all the way out past a starry base of diamond to the monkey bars, thick poles of iron polished to a coppery sheen by generations of hands. We’d shimmy our willowed bodies from side to side, then up and up, catch the swinging trapeze, or not, landing hard in a cushion of dust imprinted with elbow and knee. One winter, the old Academy track froze so slick and even, a seven-foot fence was nothing between me and that perfect ice. I skated ’til my ankles swelled against the leather boot— the free glide and backward cross, the same as Great-grandfather Piet over Amsterdam’s canals just days before a late-spring thaw would bless the boat trip over— before new lake-land revealed itself, before the line was laced with Irish; before Annie Laurie, his last surviving child, would be conceived in the rancid hold of a transatlantic schooner. * The year of the perfect ice, I was ten. By then, Annie Laurie was already old. For forty-five years, she’d held the light dominion over landscapes of brawlers, whispered liaisons, the unborn, stillborn souls disappeared from sound and sight. Most nights, she pulled her husband Dickie out from under barstools. And every spring, she scrubbed the winter sidewalks clean the length of Telyea Street. Annie Laurie was tired. A sullen March morning, the day Annie Laurie didn’t wake up, I turned twenty-one. Alone now, with no reason to stay, I traded in those northern lights for sodden Novembers and run-off straight to the Malibu pier, for the saw-edged blades of Santa Ana winds, for nights full of rumble and crack— but nothing quells this craving for ochre, orange, the leaves, the days— my September song plays on and on in deep, percussive tones that ring out here in the west, my adopted home, and there in the east, ever rising: memories burnished by autumn’s umber, gilded with falling snow.
A selection from Danger Face by C.W. Emerson. »
C.W. Emerson’s work has garnered numerous international accolades, including two awards from Poetry International: the C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize (2018) and co-winner of the 2023-24 Summer Chapbook competition. Emerson’s poetry and literary criticism have been featured in esteemed publications such as Harvard Review, Oxford University Press, Greensboro Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and more. He is the author of a chapbook, Off Coldwater Canyon (The Poetry Box, 2021), and the prize-winning portfolio, The Thoracic Diaries, forthcoming from Poetry International.
Emerson’s poetry was a finalist for The Montreal International Poetry Prize (2020), and shortlisted for the International Beverly Prize for Literature (2019). His work has been anthologized in several poetry compilations containing themes relevant to the LGBTQIA+ communities.
Dr. Emerson is a retired clinical psychologist, and divides his time between southern California and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Visit his website at theolderamericanpoet.com