A Walk to Carter’s Lake

By David Bottoms b. 1949 David Bottoms

Look, above the creek, hummingbirds in the trumpet vine.

Not too close, wait. See the green blurs

stitching the leaves?

Here at the edge of the millennium

I don’t imagine

you’d call them anything as archaic as angels.

But aren’t they agents of a sort, and secret,

dissolving and solidifying,

spying from their constantly shifting perches of air,

always nervous

of us, risking only a stab

in a bell of petals?

Don’t look so stunned, lay your pack

in the needles and catch a breath. I know,

you thought you knew me,

and now to hear me talk this way ...

I’m glad I’ve stopped pretending

to love people

and the cities where people can’t love themselves.

This is what the quiet accomplishes,

and the water trusting

the shadows to eventually peel back to the trees.

Small wonder the angels are said to despise us.

Still, without them

how do we account for our meanness?

Look at that, what else can promenade

in the air? And how easily

they’re alarmed,

revving off into the mist.

David Bottoms, “A Walk to Carter’s Lake” from Vagrant Grace. Copyright � 1999 by David Bottoms. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Vagrant Grace: Poems (1999)

Biography

David Bottoms was born in Canton, Georgia in 1949. He earned an MA from the University of West Georgia and a PhD from Florida State University. In 1979, Bottoms won the prestigious Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his collection Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. Robert Penn Warren, the contest’s judge, described Bottoms as “a strong poet, and much of his strength emerges from the fact that he is . . .

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