By Karen Mulvahill
Snow baffles the wind, jigsaws
through muzzled air, puzzles
a new landscape.
A great tree creaks like a moving swing
in an empty playground. We lift our skis
over drifts draped through sheltering woods.
Suddenly, an opening, possibility
and danger, blinding as a blank page—
a meadow bound by a furbelow of hooped trees
as if Frost’s swinger of birches had come before us.
We push snow from burdened limbs; some spring up.
In April, I return. Trunk split, the crown
of a great birch lies espaliered on meadow,
twig tendrils heavy with buds
the way cut forsythia
still blooms in a vase, or
how we skied, insensible
of the cancer
coursing through your veins.by Karen Mulvahill