The first is crossing the Ohio into Marietta,
not the green river yearning west
but each of its scalloped reflections
like scales on a crappy, and at each ripple’s
lip a premonition of ice.

Next: passing the first car southbound
salt-encrusted with two hundred miles
of I-77—what color is it really?  A casual visitor
to this state still our home may claim
there is no color here, but doesn’t gray
enfold the possibility of every color? 
Sky layered in bands dark and darker
preserving as in a comforter some memory:
warm purple; fingery hawthorn
and buckeye almost yellow; cattails
coyly pink; dark earth chocolate
between cream snowcrests –
all of them holding everything within.

In Canton the window eyes of Mercy
Hospital passing no judgement;
in Akron, the stone walls of Rockne’s,
frost like stale beer foam; peeling letters
at the exit sign: Peninsula/Hudson.
Geese in the ditch beside a Cape Cod;
rust-gray girders where we drive beneath
tank cars, coal cars, and then the Turnpike
overpass.  And as we reach your driveway,
rime, old tears the wipers can’t beat back.

Those who’ve never left here, do they notice?
And we who return, can we name
what comforts us?  Only in his eighties
did your Dad’s hair surrender to the shades
of sky and winter fields, and now when I hold
you close full of days recalled, stories
we’re sharing as if for the first time,
the good full color of Dad’s life now passed
fully into our hearts, I see in your hair thin streams
coalescing, bands of evening sky and highway,
winters we will hold together, and the springs.

 

 

 

By dusk the sky is clearing,

by midnight, moon;

next morning the branches fill

with vireos and warblers, puffs

of restless saffron,

chestnut, smoke.

 

I get the message but dawdle

to return your call; now you

think I’m too busy and

refuse to sing to me.

When we meet the sky

curdles and there’s a threat

of lightning.

 

These little birds migrate

through darkness

drawn onward by stars

and magnetism

down the spine of the coast

and across the gulf.

After the storm they glean

insects from twists of maritime

reprieve, gather breath

and promises.

 

You aren’t angry.  You only wanted

to share with me

the visitation

of their brief bodies, but I

struggle against

the tug of earth, I

am blind to stars.