By Elaine Maria Upton
No poem with jeweled words
visits me now. Only the hills,
silent and black on an afternoon
of clouds in an almost-spring,
when children’s laughter is swallowed
somewhere in schools, and you are away,
and the landlord’s black hound
lies sleeping in the awakening grass.
There are letters scattered
as if on the floor –orders to pay
fines, or report to the Registry,
to meet the dark gavel of deadlines,
and there are prohibitions, posted
from someone without a face, without
a signature or name. Yet, if I wait
the spring leaves will write themselves,
the scripts of trees filling the hills.
And the granite and quartz will grow
ever so slowly, rising between cedar
and pine. This is the orchestra
of legato, while the daffodils play a quick
stacatto, and mosquitoes sleep at the window.
Perhaps soon the black hound will wake, bark,
run, like my heart, when you come home.
Lenox, Massachusetts
16 April 1999