– After Ada Limón
Not how it all wintered into scraps of half-inked

pear blossoms, nor how the pondwater never thawed

in time for the lotuses to proclaim their succulence

to the desperate Spring, it was the inscrutable loss of how

anything could begin afterwards which bowed me.

The clouds kept saying, there will come a day

when all of this blueness will be worth it.

The months when I couldn’t tell if what hurt

was some unbreakable obsidian barb, or the hurt

of a growing, living thing. And it seemed almost pitiful,

how the frost clasped so closely to the birches;

sleeves of snow stitching the vastest grief

-coat ever conceived, entire fields suffocated

in a plead to be held. Only to be met by the soft

shock of winter unhinged at the speed it arrived, the music of held

breath returning from the scentless aftermath, wet hearts awakening

behind Spanish mosses, entire sunlit temples

of snail-shells unclouded along the highways.

How it was never about survival, but becoming

the patient rot beneath it all. Like the first of the fuchsias

now unfurling their infant flames on this patched,

uncertain earth; all of it rising for what we can’t name.