Susan Kelly-DeWitt

How many miles to the border where all the sky there is exists for the soul alone? Where the only breathers breathing are constructed from some new electricity and the flowers are made indestructible, and messages from the dead arrive like calm white birds with a gift? One more night of spiritual ice and we might all become birds, green birds frozen on a black winter branch. There is a drumming in the shadows under leaves: a million eight-eyed spiders on the march. The buckeyes beat themselves half to death against some lit-from-within screen.

One evening in winter when nothing has been enough, when the days are too short, the nights too long and cheerless, the secret and docile buds of the apple blossoms begin their quick ascent to light. Night after interminable night the sugars pucker and swell into green slips, green silks. And just as you find yourself at the end of winter’s long, cold rope, the blossoms open like pink thimbles and that black dollop of shine called bumblebee stumbles in.