sweeping pine, swept-up poem.

{pine tree by Belgravia School}

{slushy tree reflection on my street}

{looking up into the centre of world that is in the pine branches of the tree by Belgravia school}

{self-portrait, observing the upper branches of aforementioned lovely tree}

{the red pine bark on that tree soft as my grandmother's skin was, once}

* * *

A number of poems are living inside my head, slowly trickling out like snowmelt. This one I'm posting is still very sketchy -- but I do find it really helps me, to put them up here, it lets me look at them critically. & I enjoy the half-finishedness, really, because reading them in their awkward states compels me to make them better, so then I can post a finished version that has hopefully evolved.

* * *

today would be
her ninety-second birthday;
[...] <-clearly unfinished stanza! bah

tuesday’s false fecundity
with all those pampushky ( little ukrainian shrove tuesday donuts)
& wednesday, ashen; winter
slowly ending, each droplet
of meltwater on the eaves

hits my eye with the
migraine-dull precision;
pools of slush hissing rotten
fuchsia & oxidized copper,
fingernail moon widening

its jagged eclipse, then disappating,
then pain; my icicles for eyes, just
lying in the damp washcloth darkness
while outside everything sways
in the sweaty arms of the chinook.

snow seeps, blackens the
red pine’s bark. peeling tendrils
dissolve into papery light nesting
in the branches, soft like the
skin of an old woman,

cool as the paper of her
skin i kissed just after she died;
& that’s when all it’s all there
again, sadness flaring aura-sudden,
weeping trails of light & i

dig my little treefingers down
through fibrous bones, i cling to
the roots of our sharing, singing,
suffering that leaves her soil
& grows straight through my pines.

& it’s her ninety-second birthday,
grave lying under snowdrifts, &
soon the ache will stop. & this
inherited hemiplegic memory
a nervous purgative it fills me

with an clean echoing clarity
with a closeness so luminous
an ache in the spine of the world
for how this pain can heal us,
how we are both birthed into the light