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About Poet Laureate

STAIN

Christina Pugh

STAIN

Bittersweet: gold-red indelible berry, its branches

swirling in a tangle. Every autumn, we’d drive

southeast to where the bushes line the roads

in Rhode Island. Once in November, I watched

my friend’s dark sweater dip and disappear, then

rise above the tall bleached winter grass, the teasel.

Glamorous, that distant pine flashing in a field

steeped in momentary golden. And strange

are the shades that linger here from youth,

a terrain compounding confession and silence.