Blue Manifesto Letter from the Editor
Playlist
Not Full Enough
Henri Bergson on Possibility and Creation
Letter to You as a Tallgrass Meridian
Maxwell Putnam
Up ahead,
waving over the guardrail
and me not knowing nature
from a crack in the pavement,
but they were the shade and made a similar shape
in the wind to what I knew the wisp of a cattail was, I was alone
and upset, I drove past them, the plumes of a tallgrass meridian.
In the way that one trails ribbons
of goodbyes, a bit heavy on the gas
and singing, to the extent that we'd always go
skinny dipping if given the chance, even if it was late
in the season, if we had stumbled upon Lucien Carr's
upstate frogpond for example, and following the pollywogs
through the cattails bare-bottomed into the muck,
dirtied the towels we took from the clean line—
though it really was too late in the season and a slight rain
had started, our bellies taut and shivering and us,
already on the outs, if a little wind had combed through
everything swaying just so, and me driving,
you know I wouldn't have seen it for all my tears,
and the plumes of tallgrass I drove right by them—
mile marker thirty-four.
Maxwell Putnam is a poet, essayist, and MFA candidate at Sewanee's School of Letters. He lives in the Catskills; currently in residence at Dar Meso, Tunis.