Late Freeze

My neighbours drape their tulips in white sheets:

	       tender ghosts. She says, I can’t be judged by my past

actions. Each dogwood blossom smudged brown as if 

	       burnt. Yet the past stacks inside me: plates, bricks, bowls. 

Somehow, the redbuds remain, broken hearts crowded

	       on each branch like fans outside a blue stadium. 

What did I know, what did I know of love when 

	       I bent to each request like a bough caked 

in ice? She was never ice. Let’s say I was kindling.

	       Let’s say I was a matchbook. Let’s say 

it was all my fault—this freeze, the withering blossoms,

	       bees shivering in their hives, hungry yet 

shimmering. Does that erase the past? I can’t be

	       an empty glass. I can’t be a broken watch. 

Tomorrow the tulips, untucked from their blankets,

	       will gleam, like toddlers sleepy-eyed and winking. 

How glad a bloom—it can’t help itself. I couldn’t stop

	       myself, she said that night, after she chucked 

all my sentimental objects in a box: dried roses from my grandfather’s 

	       funeral, tattering into dust. Snow falls like ash 

this morning. Will next spring’s bulbs remember, 

	       nested under soil? Does soil remember? 

You can make fist after fist, but that’s not where a seed lives.