Spring Snow

A kind of counter- blossoming, diversionary, doomed, and like the needle with its drop of blood a little too transparently in love with doom, takes issue with the season: Not (the serviceberry bright with explanation) not (the redbud unspooling its silks) I know I've read the book but not (the lilac, the larch) quite yet, I still have one more card to play. Behold a six-hour wonder: six new inches bedecking the railing, the bench, the top of the circular table like a risen cake. The saplings made (who little thought what beauty weighs) to bow before their elders. The moment bears more than the usual signs of its own demise, but isn't that the bravery? Built on nothing but the self- same knots of air and ice. Already the lip of it riddled with flaws, a sort of vascular lesion that betokens—what? betokens the gathering return to elementals. (She was frightened for a minute, who had planned to be so calm.) A dripline scoring the edge of the walk. The cotton batting blown against the screen begun to pill and molt. (Who clothed them out of mercy in the skins of beasts.) And even as the last of the lightness continues to fall, the seepage underneath has gained momentum. (So that there must have been a death before the death we call the first or what became of them, the ones whose skins were taken.) Now the more- of-casting-backward-than-of- forward part, which must have happened while I wasn't looking or was looking at the skinning knives. I think I'll call this mercy too.