First Place, Poetry (tie), NMW Awards 23

Under purest ultramarine the raised
goblets of trees overrun with gold.
We should be reeling drunk and portly as groundhogs
through these windfalls of russet, citron, bronze, chartreuse.

Everywhere color pools like butter, like oil of fat nuts,
like piles of oranges under a striped tent.

Oh, let us be greedy of eyeball,
pigs scuffling in this gorgeous swill!
The dark is coming.

Let us cud this day
and spend the winter ruminant.

Let us write fat poems, and be careless.
Let us go bumbling about in wonder, legs
coated with goldenrod and smelling of acorns.

Let us be unctuous with scarlet and marigold,
larder it here, behind our foreheads
to glow in the brain's lamps
in the time of need.

Then let us mine it, stratum by stratum —
lemon, amber, copper, crimson, aubergine —
candles from the house of summer
to light the cavern through our long descent.

Each tree a sun!
Let us stare, let us be sunstruck!
Let us throw away caution, emblazon our retinas
with the flare and flame of it

so that in the unleavened winter
this vermilion spill, this skyfall,
these oils of tangerine, smears of ochre and maroon
will fatten a spare poem, dazzle the eye's window,
feed us like holy deer on the blank canvas of snow.

I spent my childhood in the cool half-tones of northern California and my working life in Los Angeles, where all seasons are imaginary. Then I rediscovered my college sweetheart, moved to upstate New York… and was struck dumb by Fall. I could speak nothing but exclamation points. During the long winter, hungering for that intense color, I began to play with the idea of storing it up the way a bear stores fat. Almost a year later I was driving down a country road, drunk again with scarlet and gold, and the whole poem began sounding in my head.

- Ruth Thompson

Ruth Thompson lives in upstate New York. She has been a professor, librarian, college administrator, and yoga teacher. Her poems have appeared in Sonora Review, Comstock Review, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, and elsewhere.