Amy Acre
Panther Mountain
There’s a poem that knows how to carry a name
through time. It’s full of plants and places
whose names curve like winding roads. Waltzing names
like Aviemore and goldenrod. Ancestral magnolia
stiffening into star anise and sleeping in rime
for a thousand years. There’s a spot called
Panther Mountain, with fringed polygala,
and somewhere, a small town bordered by a dark
wood with a hunter’s cabin in a clearing. I’m there,
sitting on the porch of the cabin, looking at
the sky of the poem. You’re there too. And all the good
that you’ve done stretches out across the poem’s
sky like clouds made of tiny white letters, like a letter
written on a napkin at a party that’s cleared of kin
and dying out. I tell you that the cabin in your mind,
white sky among the starflowers and trout lilies,
is better than a party, even one that involves napkins.
And you laugh like letting air out of a tyre,
because I am peddling nonsense and you are smarter
than me and I say that is my gift to you and then
you look annoyed. By this time the ice is melting
and we have run out of napkins, so we run
into the deep of the woods and write our names
on the leaves of the poem. We have to write
our names on every single leaf, otherwise the poem
will never end, but as we’re writing, smoky rain
comes to slake the dark green membranes
of the leaves and it’s so lush it’s kind of dirty,
like a timelapse film of growing fungus, or an
arrow-headed spruce in morning fog, middle fingers
pointing up. How will we know which leaves
we’ve already written on? one of us asks, and the other
says, it’s a poem, we’re not supposed to know.
I say, let’s do five more and then call it a day.
You say, let’s do ten to be safe. And I don’t tell you
that there’s no such thing as safe. That you are dead
and I am the one stuck at the party, and you will never
read my letter. Or that poems are letters to the dead
or dying like a breath is a paving stone, or that often,
I find it easier to talk to people who have left
the party. Instead I go back to my leaves, and nod,
and say over my shoulder, that sounds like a plan.
Just ten more.
Amy Acre is a poet and editor, born in London and living in Nottingham. Her debut collection, Mothersong (
