First Day of Spring, my mind is all over the place

Maine winters linger.

It's just what they do.

But this year it's different. Winter isn't lingering so much as it's stalled in the middle of the road. We'll be looking winter in it's ugly road-dirty grill until we can call a goddamned tow or push it out of the way, muscles straining.

I believe that people encase their past traumas in amber.

We are living beings and the hard remnants of the past are hurtful to us. We store them and we try to forget about them but they make us ill because we are living beings and we are meant to fill ourselves with the present which is alive, and the future, which is full of potential. The  dead relics poison our blood. We forget we carry them.

It's one thing to carry the certainty of death in oneself. It's another to carry death itself.

There are crows in the yard. Flapping black wings, One crow drives his head into the soft snow, he shakes his head, flaps his wings, hops forward, does it again. I thought perhaps he was looking for food but he seems to be washing himself. Now he struts away.


First day of spring poem

My hands are cold.

The radiator

hisses and rattles.

from my window

against

an expanse of new snow,

the flap and strut of ten black crows

like words written in ink

smudged

indecipherable