Marsh Wren

Midday and autumn still won’t thaw

the marsh reeds. Broken from the frost

their muzzled seedheads bend so low,

they span the water in a criss-cross

thatching grass from the bank beyond them.

The stream runs swift and yet is still—

not even deep enough for a reflection.

November has lost any sense of will,

is late, is prompt, arrives in a swirl

of spear leaves desperate to unfasten

from near dead grasses—a locket curl

above them where the marsh wren’s

nest hangs exposed, nearly torn open:

two reeds upright where it holds them.

Max Schleicher is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah, where he's a recipient of the Larry Levis Prize for poetry and a Steffensen Cannon Fellow. For this last academic year, he was the Wisconsin Poet-in-Residence at Ripon College. Poems of his have appeared in POETRY magazine, Mid American Review, Prelude, Zocalo Public Square, the Manchester Review, and other places. His work has been anthologized in New Poetry from the Midwest.