Moss-covered trees along Mill Creek, beside the Bale Grist Mill, between St. Helena and Calistoga, California. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Courtesy of the Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress.
for Fay
Johnson, VT, March, 2017
I watch two girls outside my window
gliding on the frozen banks
of the Gihon River, their laughter
carried by the crisp air
of late winter. It’s Spring technically
but it’s hard to tell with the piles of snow
barely melting from rooftops. I see one girl
then the other run & let their feet slide them
across the water’s glossy edge. I hold my breath.
This could be us but we’ve confined ourselves
to white-walled rooms, to make art
that we’ll send back to our homes
in the cities & deserts we come from, where
it’s more Spring than here, where the streets crowded
with beautifully sad traffic & people are more familiar
to our eyes than the moss that grows in patches
visible under the snow. Eventually, we’ll leave behind
the things we’ve made—the photograph
taken near the covered bridge on School Street, this poem,
my portrait you’ve painted these past few days
—because in the end we lose everything
we love, covered over by a new green.