the wait of spring

to brave spring,
your woodpeckers drum
on dead wood

your siren songs resonate –
cycles of sated seasons
while I digest our last fall

sunburns salved in quiet, weak light
snow piles
and I drift in no direction

brave spring,
let this house in wraps
and the furniture under sheets

breathe breezes as you please
there’s no heart to dust
this dead wood

---

Post Script

This poem arose in an interior season of waiting. Written near an autumn birthday, it allows fall to become both season and event: something had already happened, yet continued to be digested. More than one attachment may have entered its emotional weather, but the covered house is not a literal place. It is the inner life after warmth has receded.

The furniture remains beneath the sheets, suggesting that the forms of intimacy and ordinary care have not disappeared, though they can no longer be inhabited in the same way. “There’s no heart to dust” holds exhaustion and absence together. The heart may be too tired to tend the room, or may no longer know which heart remains in its care.

Spring is brave because it does not avoid what is dead. Its woodpeckers make an announcement of life by drumming upon dead wood. Yet the poem does not force the speaker to answer. It simply opens the wrapped house to the breeze, allowing renewal to pass through before the heart is ready to follow.

Image credit: A female Pileated Woodpecker in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia (2013).