Spring stutters, as it has
these last late years of ruin,
the sentence we are yearning for
coiled under its tongue.
A dog wanders the valley, ignoring
its girl’s call. Another storm
worries its skirts along the seaboard.
You’ll take back
these blossoms, a promise
reneged, its words
hedged and qualified until it’s still
snowing. Toward the end
of pregnancy, I walked six miles
a day, talking on the phone
or listening to the city’s buzzing
fear. As always, I
was racing: I walked to show
I could outpace my body,
that it wouldn’t
bury me. Each step
an argument against your coming
and a beckoning, the comma
a hand makes to say
go on. I walked
in thaw past the closed entrance
to the interstate, past a woman
who said her daughter
never took a step after the first
trimester, past a homeless man
who muttered happy mother’s day,
and, when I didn’t answer,
I presume. The wishes
of the wrung-out world alit
upon my body, as if I were
an altar, as if I were the goat
released into the wilderness.
When the pains began I arched
my body to allow them
an instrument: strings
well-tempered, rubbed
with amber. Trees’ colored applause
outside the hospital window
let us know real spring
had come at last, despite
the air’s embrace. But already
we were in thrall to no other
season, subject to
the revolution
of no other sphere. We lived
from then on
out of time—
each day in our mouths.
