March
Open not yet the windows. The screens can wait. Somewhere, soft light is moving through the fields, the mists, the mud, lying in tender pools. Let it sit there, undisturbed, like the Lenten rose, or the crocus, lighting its fires. And don’t walk onto the ice, where you waited all winter by the still breath of the fishing hole. The trout will not answer you, any more than the cardinal, blinking his hard eye, or the fox kits, blind in their beds. Look to the deer, soft-footed in snow, to the thin lines of their bodies. How they go even now where you cannot follow, passing from one field to the next, like light under a shade. All is in motion: the air, the ice, the first shoots spinning in darkness. Nothing is tame. Trust not the nights.
“March” (1) draws upon John Evelyn’s instructions to “open not yet the windows” and “trust not therefore the Nights too confidently, unless the weather be thorowly settled” in The Gardener’s Almanac (1683).
First published in The Poetry Review (Vol 115, No 4, Winter 2025).