The Heat of Spring

Your birds are absurd, they've forgotten
about music. They dart about
in the sky in a tangle of cold screech and fiddle,
through specks so tiny
everything is the same.

How absent you have been,
exhausted in your sun, I am
not beautiful, pale.
Come show me deepened skin, come back across
the grasslands to me.

I have coats and boots,
hats, anything you wear. I will dress you
in hot layers until suddenly you say,
"I had forgotten,
shirtsleeves are comfortable
in the snowy spring mountains."

 

 

Revisiting Thunder Ridge

in memory of Jennifer Rose

I am sure
the smallest dust grains of you
made it down to the lake
within the ferocity of a single storm --
and I imagine denser pieces
still close and further scattered
by the movement of
my God, everything.

You have passed and touched small lights
into the bluebells. I trail with the gravity of seed, bowing.
Yes, I'm still unsound about it,
the one huge thing--
not keeping you safe with your lovely spark.

Afternoon thunderstorms skirt and spit
cold on the grasses, on my legs.
There are too many wild strawberries
and mushrooms in ancient fairy scenes.
I am on my knees a hundred times
along the sweet rot of the path.

 

 

The Alfalfa Field

Tasting the ground in a sun-warmed bean
a sweetness brushes
my walk crushes, stirs aromas
taller than childhood memory,
"Don't run into that alfalfa field!"
I stand in a young girl's bare chest and shorts
on the edge of the rows
plowed deep and horizontal.
I am in braids and barely can't see
across the tops of the plants.
The old black dog will bite.
Where are the weathered washhouses
gray and wooden in the privacy of rain,
flowered to entice my mother's hummingbirds?
Arkansas splinters from the porch.

 

 

Sherry Saye lives in Colorado. An environmentalist, she enjoys native landscaping and frequently hikes the Rockies to the highest points her youngest child is able to reach. With a background in English Education, research and editing, she's a contributing editor at Acme Poets and has had her writing published online and in print. Now and then, she reads with the Bare Knuckle Poets down in the Springs.