The neighbor’s generator
still a brash
monotone of contemporary life.
The sun is a dull reprieve
and heavy snow, like guilt, does not let go.
 
Yesterday
at its beauty, limbs of maple and pine
split themselves to despair
and twin sassafras
trees fell toward our back door;
so close
to knocking, their roots ripping dark
the damask of snow. As male and female,
they were our favorite trees: birds,
whose feeder was close, look for their way-station.
 
After a day or two of mourning, 
the chainsaw battery charged, 
I begin
with small branches, each twig with fulling buds, 
each a small hope condemned. 
I pile the branches to one side,
then turn to the firewood cutting,
smelling the root beer essence.
Dehydrated, I do not suck 
of the indifferent snow,
but pause 
to count the rings of thirty lifetimes together.
                        

	for Elizabeth
 
Our kitchen linoleum has many wounds—
knives dropped between our feet.
The basement door edge is marked
with the growing of children and grandchildren.
 
Spiders have strewn carcasses
between sash windows and storms.
Leaves are stuffed in gutters as keepsakes 
clog bureau drawers. We never tidy
the cathedral stacks of books that appear
like a grail of curiosity.
 
To empty storage rooms, we ask daughters
to take their childhoods away— those 
religiously archived with no expiration dates.
They can have our yoga mats, and patterns 
of prom dresses and wedding gowns.
 
In years together we have figured
our camouflages, shuffled the shadows
of words. Love is buckets of maple sap
boiled down to a quart. We drink the taste of coffee,
discover madeleines. Memory is never enough
as love needs the annoyance of time.
 
In October is the celebration of days,
all gloried in deciduous fanfare
like landscape quilts wearing
towards fade and fray to be patched again—
many years’ comfort, many days sewn together.