Wild Cousins
They're not much,
February's tiny clumps
of grassy onion,
their slender threads
just here and there
beginning,
a few bunches
of stalwart sheathing leaves
harbinging early
the coming on
of the green's recovering
of the forest floor,
but as I crush
between index and thumb
their fragile spikes
and breathe and taste,
it's enough
to seal the pact,
as much a sign
in that pungent scent
as in all
the flowers
promised
to sweeten
the march
into April.
As If
Fickle, sun-whitened
banks of cloud
press low over the
green-blackened hollow.
In the distance,
where the run
first drops,
the twin knobs
of the Buck farm
dip and cut
against each other's sky,
red barn
a halved rectangle
jutting
red shadow into
white sky.
Even war and death
must yield
to such mass and shadow
where enters,
thundering,
the bruised light.
A milkweed feathers
over the roadbank.
The bent and stooped, twisted
rose of Sharon
is yellowed, the rose-paper
petallings dropped,
the hummingbirds gone.
When the breeze slows,
the cricket quiet
returns.
The dry hiss of drought
sounds in the
leaves' friction
with the air.
A million shadows
lit with amber
and green light,
grasses and
apple silvers and
rattling bronze papers
under the shadow-sooted branch
of the old tree
surround me
where I knew
there was headroom
I open
the trees
as if
as if opening
the rooms of paradise.