Change of Season

 
Beside the softly molded snow,
the river runs and rushes, black
and glinting with colorless moonlight –
braid-like strands,
curling and touching,
furling and blending,
little running, humming strands
warble and whisper and murmur.
Earth’s winter is a speechless maiden
braiding and braiding,
braiding her song-filled hair.
 
Earth’s summer is a naked sleeper,
breathing a regular cicada
with her head
tucked deep in pine-blue needles,
while the golden straw and the freckled petals
and the warm pink stone
soak in the shafted sun.
 
Nature mirrors woman,
but woman stands alone.
Woman’s Summer
is a spinster of forty,
who eats her breakfast
in the sun outside her cottage.
She looks at yesterday’s newspaper
and her varicose veins –
without poetry.
In her front-lawn meadow
cows are grazing,
and a forty year old tear clouds her eye :
the farmer down the lane there
will marry a girl from Pennsylvania.                              
 
Yellow leaves fall in Fall,
leaf upon leaf,
piles upon piles,
browning, drying
in layer upon layer,
in the bookshelves of her cottage.
These pages contain secrets,
says the new owner of the cottage,
so we’ll burn these leaves today
and keep the secrets stored away.
 
 Now who knows –
which heart’s sap was shrinking,
the forty year old heart,
which pushed the blood which pushed the pen,
or the dying hope
whose yellow signals asked for Spring again?
 
This woman’s Winter came in earth’s summer.
The river pool was still,
the minnows brown, and the sand
a deep, deep gold.
Her weight fell
and her heart stopped
– and no one knows which came first,
the stopping or the falling.
Two days later,
two spring-like boys,
exploring summer for its blue berries,
found her winter-cold body
in the summer-warm pool. 
 
                                      (for Marion. F., died 1950s)