Sandra Kohler
Three on March

i.

White and lit and lyric the world seems not
March but Janus, pure cold. Spring is absolute
in its offer: take what I have however I give it.
Mirage, it disappears without warning
like the light on the creek brilliant against
the colder white of snow binding fields,
coating streets and alleys, leaving stillness
everywhere, but in the creek white ripples.

ii.

The starlings appear, as always, at winter's
cold lag end when the suet cage put out for
the woodpecker's almost empty. He comes alone,
his large head cocked, shy, gentle. The starlings –
in flurries, bursts, with their stilletto beaks, mean
sleek gloss – attack the cage, contort themselves
around it to reach a crumb. March vision of
commonplace evil: an afternoon of starlings.

iii.

Columns of ice falling from the building
next door glisten among the dark branches
of the mulberry in the garden, a tree of ice
shadowing the tree of black boughs. March
is the month I feel inadequate to: its cold
brilliance, its harsh demands which weigh
like loss. Each dawning, despite the ice,
its rigid grip, insists: wake, rise, grow.

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #4: Winter 2012, Volume 2 Number 2