April Elegy
In a hush, as if it’s still morning, randomly the doves
call and vanish. The dark oaks stretch,
each one anonymous and lean.
No one, I know who you are.
Men have struggled with you in the dark and cried,
built ladders and steeples in your name
and killed. Women in labor, great
as the moon, have dreamed the original
faces of their children–yours–
the face of all waters,
green fire at the margins of leaves.
Without you the dark is a bowl of bare earth.
An old woman told me
the earth, one year too tired, would shrug and roll over.
“People don’t change,” she said. “They grow more like themselves.”
She couldn’t imagine new faces. In crowds, in dreams the same faces
came stale and hard as slices of bread thrown out for jays.
But today the shagbark waked–gracefully, Shiva
with his many arms. The shagbark flashed,
its tapered buds split sideways
and shook into the wind
green fans.
The trees snatch from the moon
Buds like tight fists. They grasp and let go
green fire.
Just now and dusk the oaks are steep and black against a sky
white as silk, new leaves so faintly kindled
they don’t reflect in the pond, only
the stark trunks show.
No one, you’re there, the fire of the many
leaves we don’t see in the pond. The mist is your smoke.
I am your smoke.
In the fire and smoke of each moment, my blood unbraids.
Green birds fill the dark.
Margaret Gibson
