—The headlong classic where
July’s leafed-out lindens & the greengage hill

Spell the end of time & break-spirit yearning:
All the cuckoo-clocks & wristwatches halt,

Even the comic mime exploring
The invisible with his expressive hands,

For the adamant, all-systems-go,
Bantering lovers who spy

A furloughed Belgian soldier tumble down
An intoxicating meadow,

Frolicking with his April-named daughter
(O her blossoming laughter

& the riverbed gold of her sunlit hair)
With such wave-crest glee & ecstasy,

The gargantuan future
& the vast, refractory past—presto chango!—

Vanish all at once—

*

Cyrus Cassells is the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas. His most recent book, The World That the Shooter Left Us, was published in 2022, and his ninth book, Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, will be published by Four Way Books in March 2024. Among his honors: a Guggenheim fellowship, the 1981 National Poetry Series, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, two NEA grants, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His 2018 volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. His second volume of Catalan translations, To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, was published in March 2023. He was nominated for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for his cultural reviews in The Washington Spectator. He teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University and received the 2021 Presidential Award for Scholarly/Creative Activities, one the university’s highest honors.