I seldom share my poetry in my blog, but this one belonged here, a thumbnail sketch of my year so far.
Deep Spring
I.
Dark rainy days of river-flooding March.
Muddy twilights of brackish pools and raindrop rhythms.
None of it touches the tears that won’t fall.
Some days are too small to contain this me I think I am.
Because that one hangs on the cross-hairs of not-knowing.
As the one who came before me prepares to leave
And the job of being here, that job,
Reminds me
That it’s not my time to go but hers.
II.
It could go either way, I think.
The sky, an indeterminate steel gray.
Light is suspended in the balance between seasons
On the cusp of some new life,
I linger in the colorless dawn
Which might also be dusk.
I hold the early swelling of buds as they begin their inevitable festival of life
Next to my mother’s certain march toward nonrenewal.
I long to be broken open, to flower.
To give birth to new life.
Or two of them.
One for her, one for me.
I sit in the space between worlds, in the not-land of unknowing.
For this moment, enough.
III
Spring is undoing me, flowering tree by tree.
I prepare to kiss my mother goodbye
Or not my mother, but some confused absence of her.
I imagine holding her hand, and without words
giving her permission for something or other, as if it’s mine to give.
A thousand little tasks steal my attention,
And then I remember the green, greening and greenest
Spring spilling all around, demanding to be seen and heard.
My feet touch ground, even as my mind ricochets,
So I breathe three extra deep breaths to take to her bedside
And return, again and again, her sidekick, as always.
