Welcome back to The Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Thursday, August 20th, 2020.

Today's poem is by Donald Justice. He, like the other poets that I've been sharing this week, was born in the month of August. He was born August 12th, 1925, and he actually died on August 6th, 2004.

He was an American poet and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1980.

The poem that I'm going to read today was published in March 1965 in Poetry Magazine,

and it's called The Evening of the Mind.

It goes like this.

Now comes the evening of the mind.

Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood.

Here is the shadow moving down the page where you sit reading by the garden wall.

Now the dwarf peach trees nailed to their trellises, shudder and droop.

You know their voices now, faintly the martyred peaches crying out your name.

The name nobody knows but you.

It is the aura and the coming on. It is the thing descending, circling here.

And now it puts a claw out, and you take it. Thankfully, in your lap, you take it so.

You said you would not go away again.

"'You didn't want to go away.

"'And yet it is as if you stood out on the dock

"'watching a little boat drift out beyond the sawgrass shallows,

"'the dead fish.

"'And you were in it, skimming past old snags, beyond, beyond under a brazen sky

as soundless as a gong before it struck. Suspended how? And now they strike it.

Now the ether dream of five years old repeats, repeats.

...