The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Trees
All day the trees were talking behind my back,
telling those tales about silence,
how it comes when the leaves are gone,
when the wind doesn’t move around in the sky,
when the snow lies.
I remember how my mother
would stand beside the window
watching for the weather to come right.
I remember horizons,
her skirts bunched in my hands.
I need the trees to tell that other story,
the one that’s murmurous with wind and leaves,
to witness for me in the way I crave.
She is old, she sways
though no wind blows.
Absence
Outside the window is April.
Stretched inside April, a garden.
On the slope of the garden, a white chair.
In the curve of the white chair, your leaving.
It stops me—though it’s hard to stop in April,
when everything is rushing to become.