Minus 42, Plus 9

a step away from the graywhite world
off the cliff and to what warm breath
what greengold chasm
what impossible delight

Unfurl

hope like arugula sprouts
big enough to be seen
from a second-floor window

*

cat out and leap-chasing
shadows—sparrow, crow,
flick/sway of still-bare branches

*

water wind-rippled in bird baths
sometimes sun-shimmered, reflecting
on redbud bark

*

that april blizzard and how
we could see again
smooth-swirl snow on rooftops,
dollops on red-budded trees

This winter

is snow on ice on ice on snow
and we know this is metaphor
also, this floundering through drifts
and bleak shivering, a slip and a fall

juncos flit and chickadees
never give up their song, the warning note
for all these branches bent under
their own frozen weight, summer’s broken stems
brittle and glazed

how far down do we hold our love’s roots, the seeds
and is this the winter
that kills them

managing

we whiz along, or grind
jaws tight with effort
to be good and right and
happy

until we explode—
all the mess to clear up
exhausted

screaming and crying and chaos and blood
nearly always
the loom of news vans

we are no more than animals
we fear

while juncos hop along the brick
cat-scattered
squirrel descends fence
walnut bigger than its head
tight in its teeth

brown marmorated stink bugs

as good as any nature center, your office
window. they touch striped antennae. just one,
in the beginning and how they got between
glass and screen and on the second story—
now you count four clinging up down right left, slow
with that deliberate creepy invasion intent.
they have the tell-tale spots and stripes
you can see very well with your hand-lens
of course they fly, but why? you keep watching

Prairie Burn, iii.

you say burned out and it means loss
unbelonging here or there, certain
withdrawal root by root, shriveled

another fire set to renew
ensure survival, this smoke
sinks low on black field

gutted clean to bare soil—
when comes the flush of green
growth? will it

Prairie Burn, ii.

your heart, you think, must
by now be something
like that Hill Country scrub—

even your outside prickly
inside hard and harder
dry white

when? there were years
of next-to-no rain
and still the flowers bloomed

Prairie Burn, i.

driving south, pear trees
like white flame, sparked wild
and a-flourish

this in-between, on-road:
bare winter prairie behind
ahead nothing but duty

wrung of its last ounce of love
a clutter of rocks
glossed with bluebonnets

fungus, canker, beetle

the old refrain: if I had known…
I tried to tell you gently
but naturally
everything eats at us

what use to say we might have saved it—
the fruit, the root, the tree?
still much remains for tending
by clean cut, green try

in a dark place

you make the god you want, not of gold
or even paper, but green-warm earth—hail
it as something gifted from the blue.

what is your church? but this slate blue
mountain, bare slopes, trees brushed soft gold,
solitude, song; or fall’s sharp wind, rain, hail,

snow silence. eyes closed, face lifted to hail
pilgrim thought. no room for guilt in sky’s blue:
if the soul lights, burns ember-gold—

I am. (gold-hail prayer in this blue)

Thanks to Christine for the three tritina words.