Poem of the Week | March 14, 2016

This week we offer a new poem by Amie Whittemore. Whittemore is a poet, educator, and co-founder of the Charlottesville Reading Series in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Smartish Pace, North American Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, Glass Harvest, is forthcoming from Autumn House Press.
 
Author’s note:

Ever since I was a teenager, fall seemed the season of possibility: a new school year could mean, maybe, a new self? Could mean a slipping of one’s own dead leaves, of putting on a bright show? Autumn’s blend of departure and new starts, of fading and glowing at once, still gets me all worked up. Even though I am no longer a student and only sometimes a teacher, the crispness in the air still points to shaking off whatever shades one’s heart. “Autumn Thinking” distils this feeling as well as this feeling’s shadow: the self’s stubborn way of being perpetually static and fluid. I can’t shed all the dead skin at once, nor can I blossom when spring’s light reaches just the right angle. Which is to say this is a poem not only about autumn, but also about my abiding desire to be a tree someday.