The fuse is lit.
Equinoxes arrive like clockwork,
along with our yearnings,
but the bud is spontaneous, and local:
rain, clouds, temperature, and sunshine;
on- or off-shore breezes,
the hour fog burns off,
elevation of hill and swale.
There’s always a warm side
where daffodils cozy a foundation
and ambush the un-expecting,
like me.
In the forest thermoclines
Young trees debut their
leaves before the older;
the season on the forest floor,
is not the same as the canopy,
where raptor winter
still perches,
talons out for a downward swoop
on extended wings.
I’ll tighten my scarf today.
Trees tell time,
and what time feels like.
Breakfast is where the syrup is.
We sit there
soaking up all available light and heat,
gauging whether this is the day
for rolling up our flannel sleeves,
to leaf out.
There’ll be more snow
– a fleeting ground cover?
Open-water fishing beckons,
while ice on the lake
still supports a snowmobile.
Doesn’t spring make us feel like saplings?
Even hunched by ice and snow;
branches broken, our bark deer-nibbled;
timid from persistence of cold;
wary of shocking our tender new growth at branch tip,
we also start new annual rings in our heartwood.
By god the elasticity of mud encourages;
sap will flow to our feet;
stir our tuberous souls.
There are yet three months until lupines;
four until raspberries;
five until blueberries cover the barrens.
Bears too stir in contemplative, fitful slumber,
appetites recharging, dreaming of low-hanging bird feeders.
Somewhere the early bird watches the constellations,
thinking “The worm, the worm!”
Are we too that bird?
The force that to the bird feeder brunch drives the bear
drives me.
—Todd R. Nelson
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