Auguress
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The pendulum of her clock keeps perfect time. Impatient, propped against the windowsill, she waits for noon, for flights departing north from the neighboring airport. As they climb, their steel bellies drag broad shadows across her lawn. She fidgets as the garden dims: her roses and the untrimmed clematis, the hanging feeder—her entire street darkens beneath the turbines’ hiss. Before and after, she often wonders where they go— imagines conversations, attendants neat and eager, rows of smiles as sharp as scythes— but while their passing shadows briefly fill her empty teacup to its brim—she knows. [End Page 31]
MICHAEL SHEWMAKER is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Yale Review, New Criterion, Oxford American, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. His work was awarded the 2013 Morton Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
