Pexels

The property line melts into forest, its late winter browns speak

An unknown beast’s pelt; felled oaks hunch over like sleeping bears

While beech and birch extend into ugly candid possum hair,

And elms and maples muster into a passel of woodchuck.

The air waited on first signs of spring, curling up like smoke

Through your lips—petals pressed thin as pencils, yet capable of shape

And form; they’re forced into a smile by a late March sleep

That’s going too late for April showers. The ice is glassed

Over, bonding yesterday afternoon’s puddles crested with a crust,

The gouged march of cattle habitual for bleak pasture;

The frozen prints are filmy, each a black and white fish-eyed fissure

That gazes up from feathery hooks to ultimate grey; outside

We’ve come to test the meadows and taste a weather now hard and fast

As tombs. Embraced by down and wool, we try hard to ignore

The vestiges of conversational winter, snow that quipped before

In patches defers now to observations of gelid mud. The quiet

Of fire in the parlor stove lives on—but chimney questions hang

Beyond their usefulness—like the organic out-of-place odor

Of summer cotton released as a felt presence in a room by iron’s heat.

You, so thickly dressed for outdoors, could be woman or man; but your feet

Deliberate with feminine pause, your eyes have decided to fight

The urge to ever meet on the issue but maintain the right differences

Like valleys that separate the hills with everlasting distances.

With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return, bounding

The fields with pump-handled pinions rising, falling, following

Their shadows over stubbled acres like dolphins through a splintered sea.

You look up: the incoming chevrons course across the valley.

Your smile relaxes, warms up, shares the sky and ground with no one.

Your glance takes in the entire landscape without love, but then

You allow that spring may overwhelm us any moment; I gather

Your silhouette by heart with the brittle memory of ice. The sky

Has turned indigo. (The day’s vanishing point held us where we stood.)

A breeze stirs the sleeping forest from its impenetrable mood;

The cold air pushes our shadows together. We page through the horizon

For once-familiar trees—now a woodpile we reach for but cannot touch.

Joseph O'Brien

Joseph O’Brien is the poetry editor for the San Diego Reader.