There was no making me speak. I was stoic
as the horse made of foil on my teacher’s shelf.
By spring I didn’t want to go home most days,
so I took the long way across the field
and folded the pendulous throats of the first
trumpet flowers, eyeing, just beyond them,
switchgrass, a lone oak rippling in the fen.
Some afternoons it snowed again, muffling
the earliest scilla, but still they bloomed,
and each day light spilling over the hill
would write itself into everything I saw:
mud-heap, sidewalk, shadow, skin,
the new hairs on my arms rising in wind—
the sun escaped from its cage a little longer.
