Two feet of snow
for three months
have finally melted
and revealed
our earliest spring garden —
a blue bucket, not ours,
three grocery bags, torn,
a shredded dry cleaner bag,
various bricks, once neatly stacked,
now leveled and tossed,
a fairy, headless but still holding wind chimes,
eighteen inches from its stand,
a sack of concrete mix, swollen and burst,
with its paper sack thinned and scattered in pieces,
a receipt from Walgreens for toothpaste and dog food,
two styrofoam cups, crumbled and flattened,
ten feet of twisted wire,
a beer can,
a bird feeder,
nine – yes, nine! – newspapers
still in their blue bags
on either side of our front porch.
Not much of a beginning,
but it will come.
Poems from in between 