The leaves of this maple are bronze
purple, shaped like flames,
here hang this season’s little
glass berries, the water from passing rains
the weather of little heaves in the chest
congestus clouds exhaled in bouts of sadness.
Demeter, never ecstatic, this May
doesn’t bring the summer in a burst of screaming
dancing fire when her daughter is let
to lift her veil this year, but she comes around
slowly. She sees her baby
barely makes a word or a passing glance
so some days are worse than the last day
and then she is bitter like a clump of ground, like char,
has days where she sneers,
a face like a fishhook has settled in her lip.
then days where she is nothing but forgetting smiles
and days where the bitter seed in her heart blossoms.
Mostly, she cries. that’s the most interesting to me,
that the crying waits until the moment of relief.
All winter she has buried herself
in a furrowed brow, silently tilled
the sky full of frost, dreamed out shimmering
lights to kill the solar wind,
but come the relief of spring it pops loose:
a wheel that waits to turn until after the carriage is drawn,
a baby who doesn’t cry until she’s held,
a woman who sits at her bedside and thinks
until the thoughts are all gone, condensed into
clear water
a leaf