☀ Today's Poem: "The River" Pascale Petit

Today's Headline: "Why Catullus Continues to Seduce Us"

April 3, 2025 The River Pascale Petit started to flow when I was thirteen — it grew between me and my mother. I saw the jaguar bathe in the shallows. The caiman with his crown of horseflies accepted me as a friend. He led me to the swift centre where night hawks roosted on driftwood, raised their sleepy eyelids, and were not angered by my presence. They were forest-dreaming as the current took me in its arms and whispered encouragement. My mother's chair seemed further away on the far bank and I could no longer hear the words that stung. The river glittered with waves and each was a picture I could paint or a book I could write. It was as if I'd entered a new element and could breathe water. My feet touched the bottom where stones told me their stories and I listened. Capybaras barked a welcome and even the cowbirds on their backs gurgled as they plucked botflies from their mounts. I plunged into the fertile world and swam to safety. I wrapped each wave around my neck like a shawl of sunlight. The anaconda swam with me and every scale was a make-up mirror telling me I wasn't ugly. My brown eyes were not cow-shit but clean as the harpy eagle's, morphos drank my tears and fluttered on my lashes — everywhere I looked I saw my future was gilded blue. My black hair mother had cropped to my scalp grew into ringlets of vines on which jacamars and tanagers perched. Marmosets played in the coils and made me laugh. When I floated on my back, my breasts were two turtles drying their shells on a mudbank. And when the jaguar dived beneath me and lifted me up into the light I clung to his back and rode my life. from the journal POETRY LONDON READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward ‘The River’ is the opening poem of my new collection, "Beast." The river is the Río Tambopata in the Peruvian Amazon, the creatures are all ones I observed, including a jaguar who had just swum across and was drying his fur on the bank. I think of the Amazon rainforest as a mother, replacing my own mother whom I only lived with as a teenager. Like her, it’s abused, and although dangerous, is a place I love. Pascale Petit on "The River" "Why Catullus Continues to Seduce Us" "'In Catullus we have, in a sense, not one poet but two,' the editors of 'Two Centuries' acknowledged. Most scholars would agree. On the one hand, there is the impetuous, often swaggering young writer whose sometimes brash, sometimes tender personality vividly emerges from the hundred-odd poems that have come down to us....On the other hand, there is the doctus poeta, the refined littérateur celebrated for his delicacy and wit, who peppered even his occasional verse with elaborate word games and abstruse allusions." viaTHE NEW YORKER READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES What Sparks Poetry: Heather Green on Life in Public "In 'Forgiveness,' Pinsky’s fluid, associative form moves an electron cloud of image, shadow, and fact around a heavy nucleus of a solitary voice wrestling with its own thoughts, ambitions, and ethical questions. The poem steers from Emmanuel Levinas’s lecture 'The forgiving / Of an unforgivable crime' to Pound’s poetics (and Pinsky’s revelation about duration and stress) in a whorl of motion, a record of a dynamic thought process animated, in part, by music." READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE donate View in browser You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. If you would like to unsubscribe please click here. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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