Frannie Lindsay

Wisdom

Friends may be starting to say
he’s not right in the brain
now that he can’t
use a phone can’t sign his own name
can’t send out any sort of a flare

but the ones who will always
have mattered to him
still know that his mind is the same
sun-washed library where all
the thick and beloved volumes
are safe in the beat-up shoes
of their green and brown leather covers

and there are tall golden windows
where grief-weathered elms and oaks
reach in with their slow bent shadows

he always imagines it is late in the day
and something to thumb through
would help with his old wish to settle
so he slides any book
from a shelf he can easily reach
and with the reverence he hasn’t forgotten
sets it down by his favorite armchair

Author: Frannie Lindsay

Frannie Lindsay’s sixth volume of poetry, The Snow’s Wife was published by Cavankerry Press as part of their Notable Voices Series. Her other titles are If Mercy and Mayweed (The Word Works); Our Vanishing (Red Hen Press); Lamb (Perugia); and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press). She has held residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Millay Colony. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and many others, as well as The Best American Poetry and The Plume Anthology of Poetry. She is a past winner of the Missouri Review Prize.

 

Plume: