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.


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Ring Mountain