the return

The world is white today, perfectly fitting for the first of March. One of our only true winter snowstorms, and it piles up on the lids of the sap buckets. The birds are in-between, too. They are trying on their breeding plumage, without fully committing. I notice it most in the goldfinches, whose dusty olive backs are getting yellower, whose bright white wing bars seem more striking and defined. I've seen one who almost has his black cap fastened. The cardinals' beaks are brighter, too, and the house finches' salmon-purple back patches show up like flashes against the snow. But it's still only the winter inhabitants I see - the warblers are a ways off.

Persephone will come back, soon. She and Demeter and Hecate have popped up around me lately, in reading and conversation, and it's got my mind on pomegranates. And as I write there is one male cardinal, all contrast and vitality.

I want to be baptized with pomegrates,

blood-red, of this world.

I want what is not purification,

But what will take me under -

An unction from inside cells and muscle.

I want to crush crisp rubies

on leathery skin,

Not the unknowing velvet of birth.

No, and the sticky red will stain

my gray hair.

It will trace wrinkles

and stick, stuck and unseemly.

If there are rotten gems they

Too, crush them too.

I want it all, faceted ovary -

And also I will be the one to do it.