Green by Kathline Carr

There is a particular green for a morning in April,
the ground thawing, new stalks pushing their way out
of the damp earth. The pubescent trees are furred with new growth,
flowers are beginning the mating march to their demise.
It doesn’t seem like a time to be mourning, but death presents
itself arbitrarily, in spite of the cloudless sky with the sun
beating hot on the porch boards, the peepers loud even in the morning,
mallards nesting beside the pond in the lower field,
the unveiling of long-forgotten green.
Soon my mother will be a widow. Her husband lies
in a climate controlled room, heavy lidded and immobile, an amputee,
a bilateral amputee. He bears this with an air of quiet hatred
and futility. In this season of new life and mourning,
I am wearing boots for mud, and thinking of my stepfather last spring,
before he was so ill, when he had legs, walking down the driveway from his house to mine, but gingerly, yes, the circulation had already begun to fail.
Cleaning his workshop in the barn, cursing the mud,
putting the plow away until next winter.
I can’t remember now anything he said last spring
I curse my faulty recall, I am cold with regret--
Who will remember me?
Spring is pale green and tentative as a freshblown ball of glass,
with a dark shard of death impaling its center.

for Lou Goodwin