“The Beauty of the Village” by Steve Wilson

Theodore Clement Steele, Autumn Landscape, 1901, oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. Patrice Gouvernayre (Betsy Paxton Gouvernayre ’71) in memory of her father, Dr. Thomas R. Paxton), 1980. Collection of the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College, founded as Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.

after Theodore Clement Steele’s Autumn Landscape

— along the hills,
the broadening crowns
of maples.  Autumn,

and a few leaves
early gone.
Even to the edge of sight,

the sky worries its moments
of blue and white,
bluewhite, green.

The valley, barns
and their dark houses –
therein happens some old concern:

thought now, it settles,
a shadow,
in some farther room —

Recent poems by Steve Wilson are out or forthcoming in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Borderlands, Commonweal, Poem, Georgetown Review, North American Review, America, The Christian Science Monitor, Blue Unicorn, New Orleans Review, The Christian Century, New American Writing, Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Midwest Quarterly, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and New Letters; as well as in a number of anthologies, including O Taste and See: Food Poems (Bottom Dog Press), Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by Robert Frost (University of Iowa), Stories from Where We Live: The Gulf Coast (Milkweed Editions), Like Thunder:  Poets Respond to Violence in America (University of Iowa), What Have You Lost? (Greenwillow), American Diaspora:  Poetry of Displacement (University of Iowa), An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions), Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude (Holy Cow! Press), Classifieds: An Anthology of Prose Poems (Equinox), Improbable Worlds: An Anthology of Texas and Louisiana Poets (Mutabilis) and Going Down Grand: Poetry of the Grand Canyon (Lithic).  His books include Allegory Dance and The Singapore Express and The Lost Seventh.