Poems

Let neither of us speak.

It wasn’t snow
anymore but glitter
raining down from
some bright sieve

Others report fields of zinnias, trains chugging while he stands at the depot

Where we store folding chairs
and empty baskets, he bangs
on padlocked doors and shouts

Saint James says not to be as one
who looks into a mirror
and then forgets his face,

but he was never seventeen, a girl in love

Don’t go, she says. It’s dark.
The cold is hardly worth the stars.

I tend petunias on my deck,
pluck spent blooms,

I want you to have seen wide fields,
the fields your father farmed,

I sit next to the chokecherry tree fat with little white flowers in past weeks holding a book without opening it. I do this so the world won’t smell like you. It’s all new since you left – rain, cut grass, little white flowers – that should make it better. Nothing close like winter wool….

There were two kinds of mornings
the day you were born.