Almost Mid-March \ Now Rises April

Alan: Winter, like all of us, can be vain, even as it starts to show its age.

Almost Mid-March

Winter notices its fat thighs.

It thinks it’s a white beast

breathing down all our necks.

But it looks at itself now

and sees: cellulite.  Or at least

the snow sagging and dimpling

under this outrage of sun.

This breeze from afar.

Just days ago winter, sorcerer,

sorceress? – this ungendered maw,

taut belly of need, held us,

batted us around as it willed.

But today?  Today winter

looks at the calendar.

Almost mid-March.  Suddenly

it’s tired, tired of all its tricks

and tired of itself.  Time,

thinks winter, for a vacation.

Time to attend to those thighs.

Time enough to go

and come back ravenous

and roaring one more time.

Nancy: Waiting for a day of mild air, a day when I might take a deep breath and hum an old tune from my childhood.

Now Rises April

as from a winter sleep

     as from a dark constellation

April rises: birdsong, watersong

     green shoots, promise of flowers

saltmarsh perfume, call of shorebirds

     as from a dark sleep

I rise, surprised, take a step

     toward rising light

toward the promise of flowers

     an old woman

singing

fair, fair is the morning

Snow On The Windows \ Climbing March Hill #4

Nancy: When the windows are obliterated with whirling blowing snow, only the mind can escape.

Snow On The Windows

a landscape

a geology textbook

a campsite at Jumbo Rocks

a canyon, walking deep into history

a rolling meadow

a cave

icebergs

Mount Kailas, streaming cloud

I might say

    I am shut in

    yes, I am shut in

traveling

traveling

Alan: Snowstorm after snowstorm, six feet, nine feet, eleven feet... And yet even in this hard winter, early March hints at another season coming.

Climbing March Hill #4

You say, “Look at the sky!”

I see “bruised.”  I see “angry.”

“Livid.”  I see welts,

something stretched out wounded.

Your pain and mine, everyone’s.

Lifetimes of hurts.

I see a storm far to the south,

heavy thumb on the mid-Atlantic states.

Stranded commuters.  A jet

off the runway, almost

in the river.  People running.

I see long tongues of flame.

I see this through another window

than last time.  Another angle,

a little farther north.

I see a furnace banking itself behind spruces,

the sharp line of trees on the crest of the hill we live on.

A blindly biting mouth.

I see winter suddenly afraid of its own mortality.

I see a break in the storms, a chance for the snow to settle.

I see another cold night coming and a clear dawn,

the evening star setting west.

I see seeds waiting under the snow.

“Beautiful,” I say to you.  “Beautiful.”