Early spring, the first light
still vague, nacreous, glacial
and nothing of the season in the air
but rain, the gray and lateral
sweep of limbs above the roof
a scrawl, a line drawn in spindle and spine—
nothing of the season in the mire
of waste place and field
but the wildflower the French call dent-de-lion
for the serrated edges
of its basal leaves.
In this light, this moment,
this might be home, my mother
alive again, in love with the turning
of the year, down on her knees
in the fields of the Ohio Valley
to harvest the greens: alchemy of earth, wind,
and water, a sort of sunlight
on the tongue,
the walk home somnolent, her work at the sink slow,
the kitchen tamped down,
doorway and window.
The rain falls, now incremental,
measurable across the vertical
light, the endless pattern already begun
in the parry of root and knife,
then the leaves in a moment
darken to bitterness, and the blowball, blowzy
on the wind, relays desire
or fidelity promised,
and what remains in the hand—a tally of lapsed
time—is counted, seed
by seed, hour by hour.
This poem first appeared in Poetry.
—
Myrna Stone is the author of six books of poems. A two-time Ohioana Book Award Finalist, her work has appeared in seventeen anthologies and in over fifty journals including Poetry, Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, Boulevard, Nimrod, and River Styx. She has received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, a full fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year award, and the 2017 New Letters Prize in Poetry.
