
Discovery
A slender hope, this thistle of light, piercing
with its lengthening triangular mark
the late-season slip of snow. The window well cover,
blue-tinted, is now gone. I failed to notice its absence
when I turned up the drive earlier, home from school.
Inside, my wife lay on the couch, sick now a few days,
her face flaxen as dormant grass; eyes half-closed
always. We’d hoped it wouldn’t last the night
that boisterous wind lifted the flap of the bath fan vent
like a cardiac arrhythmia till morning, by which time
we’d lost our downspout. Tree limbs lay everywhere.
That same wind’d separated the window well cover
from whatever corrugated rim had been holding back
loam from spilling into the graveled pit
dug to let light inside whoever’s basement.
I don’t know to whom the cover belonged.
It rattled up our drive, knocking like someone
without shelter would; trepidatiously,
I took it in, set it on a soft mound of snow
beside the garage, and kept it until our neighbor rang
this morning, gripping the cover in one hand.
Can a cover struggle in a man’s fist
like a sick woman anxious to shake off illness?
Can it tremble the way she trembles, gloved with sweat?
Does its skin resemble hers when she winces,
spasm-wracked, begging for permission
to know, against all knowing, when it’ll end?
At the end of the drive, sunlight reached through it
to untuck a thousand withered grass blades
from beneath the late-blanketing snow.
Before he let the cover go at the curb and walked to work,
I told my neighbor my version of the truth: it belonged
a few doors down. The end. But look: the thinnest limbs
of the maple curl upward to receive the sun.
They’ve budded already. Red pinches like erasers
tip their ends. Dropped fruit bruises. That maple’s mess
will be considerable, my neighbor said. Everywhere
there’ll be limbs. I knew I could take most by hand,
snap them one at a time into eight-inch segments —
so long as their thickest parts were thinner than my thumb.
Any thicker and I’d have to drive my knee through.
I can act strong; often, though, I’m barely strong enough.

