a poem by frances richey

Trodden Weed

                                 --after Andrew Wyeth


I dreamt he came on foot
             across the fields
and I said Come.
             I knew those boots,
the bottom of his coat,
             his princely furs--
He was an artist,
             master of pigments
and the yolk,
             the shimmering web--
long polls trailing shadows
             frail as men. But he withdrew,
and when I woke I felt
             my father’s hands
rubbing oil into my skin,
             as if I still
belonged to him.
             Where did he go?
Now I walk the winter
             grasses of the high ridge
to the sea, in my mind the mournful
             clarity of wind--
And all the memories moving deep
             inside the water,
the way birds migrate
             through the sky--
it’s the same above and below--
             hunger and flight,
the bright wing of formation,
             not one alone,
and night a dream of darkness
             they forget. I am the father
and the son, a reckoning of nets--
             What can’t be seen is in the picture too.


"Trodden Weed" is from the collection The Burning Point.




Frances Richey’s publications include two poetry collections: The Burning Point, which won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2003, and The Warrior, published by Viking Penguin in 2008.  She is the editor of a chapbook of poetry entitled Voices of the Guard, and a former poetry editor for Bellevue Literary Review.  Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salamander, Salmagundi, Notre Dame Review, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily and upstreet among others. She lives and works in New York City.