Coming of Age

For Cathy’s Birthday

Ripped and splintered from higher boughs,
The gnarled last leaves, knots, seeds
Of another season’s glow lie rotten on
A winter bed like so much trash, stripped
Debris of limbs that in the sky cohere but,
Still rose-hipped, rest so stiffly here
Beneath the wide soft bandage of the air,
Old body of the sun’s long look, unfair
Perhaps when such a smock can turn to bone
From the turning of a sphere alone, but in
The turning well-insured: stuck upright
In snow, and arrow-straight, a stick, what
Else, has in falling driven deep to loam
Through the compost of a funeral heap
And even now has put down roots which,
Reaching toward the spring, show how a
Drive to settle and make safe can flow
Through the strange wood’s barren wake.

March 7th, 1984