The Poet

THE POET by Paula Weld-Cary (first published in Atlanta Review)

A poet walks in the moonlight, on a frost-covered path filled with fallen apples, her steps leave cider scent among the leaves. She walks in a world where computer chips have pushed their way inside the human heart, yet carries her poems like a handful of maple seeds, blossomed and ripe, to be held briefly then tossed twirling into the wide-open air, traveling like light of stars to faraway lands, into the souls of those nearby. She remembers her father’s words. He said: no purse full of coins will be given to corrupt the sweetness of poetry, which like sap is to be sucked and savored in lean winter. As so she tastes the sounds of poems on her tongue as she walks away from billboards and neon lights. No purse of coins, and she sees that the evening is filled with a thousand possibilities, the crisp air a scent whose hugeness she breathes on her way to a room full of people waiting for her to melt away the evening’s gloom.