Springtide Poem by Tara Teeling

This side of the world yawns
and lets out the new breath
of a long, cold birth.

The trees remain stripped,
jewelry peeled away, with
branches like skeletal fingers raised upward,
begging, invoking, basking.

From here, gazing up at
the naked poplars and maples,
the limbs are like forked roadways
scratched on an empyrean map,
with all routes headed toward
the blue beyond and a marble-onion moon.

Breathing in, there is the same smell
in this beginning as in the endings:
turned dirt, ordure and
various shifts in earthly composition;
with the slow contraction and
dissolve of a fierce, sunless season,
glassy blood pools in low places,
seeping into the soil,
bringing all evidence of the dead with it.

Green,
shoots up from the muck,
like arrowheads through a wooden door,
and a russet-breasted robin bounces
along the rim of the wasting arctic garden
searching for life in the wreckage.