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In memory of Dorothy Parkander, scholar and teacher (1925–2018)

How strong I feel the sun!
I feel the rain some days
That strong. Today is one:

Sunlight has evanesced,
As if itself become
Dark clouds, cold rain, unrest.

I move through this blind day
By words—their small gold glow—
Words treasured, given away

For love’s sake, which still burn
As candles do in church,
Lit each to each in turn,

Flickering, growing faint—
Surviving, almost holy,
In weakness like a saint.

Waking to winter’s dawn
the room drained of color,
except for neon numbers—
6:14—blinking on the bruise
of the bureau against a pale
wall while out the window,
seen through glass darkly,
a world shrouded, everything,
all of it, wrapped in gauze:
like Lazarus, I think, when
Jesus, weeping, called him forth,
and he woke from death, blinded,
his body bound by strips of cloth
that, like a chrysalis dissolving,
fall away as he rises, trembling,
to stumble through the darkness,

Thumb-born across the temples,
Earth’s smear, in all the surface brush
and shove, wipes speedily away.
But to those who bear the season,
who wear the stark and somber mark within,
a depth plumbs deeper
than the tomb, a path leads
beyond the dust toward a garden,
a light that shines beyond mortality’s
dark warning.

Fear tries to keep you small,
presses you under its wide thumb

so you never want to leave the house,
make the phone call, pray for help.

But sometimes you pry yourself loose,
slip out into the winter night

and pass through a shimmering black tunnel—
no moon, no stars, no flashlight—

where anything might happen, and does.
You fall to your knees and listen

to the scuffing noise of leftover leaves
on the beech trees, calling with each rustle:

Be more like us. Dwell naked
in the night without running away.

I remember my mother’s room
and the windows overlooking the river
and the steel mills of my Pittsburgh childhood,
Bessemer furnaces stoked with coke and coal
and iron ore, boats and barges floating up
and down the river.

Yeshiva school children took day trips
to white hot molten rivers ladled into casts.
Pittsburgh is big shouldered we were told
and innocently thought this the original
while picnicking lunches on benches
by the river in the glow of iron coke and coal.

This is the season:
Cradle of quiet,
Trees, waiting,
Naked on the hill,
Branches entwined
Like lovers holding
Hands.

Nothing is hidden.
A lone leaf quivers
On the apple tree.
Snow has yet to fall.
Waiting, the grass
Lies mute.

It could be death but
Isn’t. Yet. Wings
Quicken serrated air
As nuthatch, junco,
Chickadee flit from
Tree to tree, oblivious
To the hawk circling
Overhead, waiting,
Like the grass, for what
Comes next.

           Basket of Peaches, by Joseph Decker, 1885, oil on canvas

The checker at Walmart this morning
thinks the winter weather’s been bipolar.

Record highs one week, then lows in the 20s.
Our little maple started to bud

in mid-February, she says. A hard freeze
has made it sad now, she says. A local

landscaper, a buddy of mine, I tell
her, knows the trees are tough around here.

They’ll be fine, he says. It’s not like
we’re growing peaches anymore