How to Find Faery

Nan Fry

Watch and honor your cat

when his green eyes look through

and beyond you. Do the same

for your dog when she sniffs

and barks at invisible things.

Find a beech forest or even

one tree. Stand under it and listen.

The rushing you hear will be wind

in the leaves or the murmur of elves.

Take a bath in the moonlight.

Where moonbeams touch

the water’s skin, sometimes

a nixie will swim.

Go to the shore and watch the tide

ebb at sunrise or sunset. Notice

how the wet sand holds the sky’s

hues of mauve and coral.

Gradually the light brightens or fades,

and the sand returns to its own color.

Even so the world of faery washes

over this one, then recedes.

Here and there a shell gleams.

Pick up the shell and go home.

If it fades in the dry light of day,

shine it with your own spit

as a sign of the magic within you

that rises to meet the world’s

darkness and flash.

Nan Fry is an associate professor in the Academic Studies Department at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Say What I Am Called, a selection of riddles translated from the Anglo-Saxon, and Relearning the Dark. The Poetry Society of America has placed one of her poems on posters in the transit systems of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland, as part of their Poetry in Motion program. Her poems have appeared in several recent anthologies including Poetry in Motion: From Coast to Coast and Opening a Door: Reading Poetry in the Middle School Classroom.

Author’s Note

As Robert Frost noted, a poem can say more than one thing at a time. When I wrote “How to Find Faery,” I was thinking of those hints of magic that we sense in our ordinary lives, of how such glimpses can transform our view of reality, of how fleeting they are, and of how, ultimately, they come both from within us and in our response to the world.