Rebecca Baggett
Before
(on viewing Andrew Wyeth’s Indian Summer)
The naked woman hesitates
between the hard wall of water,
the glittering fall of granite,
a woman like a peeled stalk
of grass, pearl-pale, soft,
bracketed by the merciless water,
the gleaming granite cliff
where green-black cedars loom,
a quivering fragment of light
poised to hurl itself
against one brutality
or another
Rebecca Baggett is the author of the prize-winning collection, The Woman Who Lives Without Money (Regal House Publishing, 2022) and four chapbooks, including God Puts on the Body of a Deer (Main Street Rag) and Thalassa (Finishing Line Press). Her work has appeared in journals including The Southern Review, The Sun, New England Review, and North American Review and in numerous anthologies. A native of North Carolina, she has lived for most of her adult life in Athens, GA, where she worked as a lead academic advisor for the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at UGA. In retirement, she stewards Little Free Library #110420 and is a member of the Three Rivers Poets group. She enjoys indie bookshops, libraries, solarpunk fiction, theatre, native gardening/habitat restoration, watching the younger generation take over the world, and her three-year-old grandson.
9.2