“Traipsing” by J. Kates

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We meant to work. New snow
carpeted all the tempting trails
and veiled the wood I’d stacked
against this day. We should
have hefted it to the pick-up
and ridden it back to the house.

But hell. The sun was shining
(as my wife would say, meaning:
it’s obvious) and the woods
were lovely, light as they can be
when all the leaves lie underfoot,
and the truck had busted a front tire.

Here’s to the day, the kids whacking
at hemlocks with a broken beech,
the grown-ups chattering lazily,
the grouse keeping quiet and the deer,
nothing but footprints. And here’s
to hot apple cider and cold beer.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds
Accents Publishing

J. KatesJ. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).

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