Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: Freeze Frame

Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate

Marcia Brown, the former poet laureate of Portland, writes that even though we may lament we can’t preserve moments in time, “the poem in a sense does just that.”

Freeze Frame by Marcia F. Brown

Camera, tripod, satchel of gear
shouldered under dry branches,
you are headed out to take a picture
of the loon we think
will winter over on the salt pond.

In the upstairs window, pen in hand,
I am framing this picture of you
intent on your mission: green shirt,
gray vest in the mottled light
of Indian summer.

Beloved, you walk as much with this world
as the deer. How do I say
how the hay-gold grasses
bend to you? How the split rails
draw you to their vanishing point,

beyond which, a bird—wild
and ancient—sends up
its hollow, fluted cry
and how for one moment, I long
to know a distant song,

something I can sing
to hold you there.

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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2010 Marcia F. Brown. Reprinted from What on Earth, Moon Pie Press, 2010, by permission of Marcia F. Brown. Please note that the column is no longer accepting submissions; comments about it may be directed to special consultant to the poet laureate, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 207-228-8263. Take Heart: Poems from Maine, an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.