Maggie Dietz

Sometimes nature deceives us into thinking we can pause, all the while demonstrating the ways time keeps bearing forward. Certain stretches of high summer – and certain stretches of my children’s childhoods – have felt almost suspended. “Reprieve” focuses on those moments I’ve experienced peak greenness, and some primal chord of pure potential. Cicadas are a suitable soundtrack, and nothing better represents the feeling than the morning glory vines I’ve observed coiling themselves with invisible volition onto the trellis and porch-rail. “Trick Narcissus” recalls how the Homeric Hymns describe the flower Persephone found in a field: “From its root a hundred heads grew out and a perfumed odor; the whole broad sky above and the whole earth smiled, and the salty swell of the sea” (tr. Martin L. West). So went the planning of more powerful gods: the girl would not be able to resist the thrall of beauty, a blossom that charmed the socks off the very atmosphere. As a parent I have found it hard to resist a certain kind of what-iffing that unspools various rosy outcomes had this or that not happened. As in real life, in this poem such imaginings are a knife’s-edge of an enterprise: there is rue in them, and also comfort.