Willow Minnows
At the bottom of the mill’s tethered water
wheel the willows shed slender pale-yellow
leaves into the millrace, slow now and low
in late September; you stand and wait
for their drift to grow heavy as they take
up the brown water; but you are not ready
when the leaves all at once begin to swim
on their own, shiners, minnows faster
than stream or season, dart and glint
in a sudden sparkling shoal, flicking
away downstream right through December’s glass
icicles and February’s frozen mud into April,
where they spring up from the tailrace and back onto bare
whippy limbs, gold as the reborn sun
but deepening as you watch into thin viridian,
so that the willows now blooming their powdery caterpillar
catkins arch and stretch new fingerling leaves
of air-breathing light-drinking photosynthesizing fish.
Catherine Carter’s poetry collections include Larvae of the Nearest Stars, The Swamp Monster at Home, The Memory of Gills, and Marks of the Witch. Read more.