Like a beast’s pelt: oaks hunched like sleeping bear

With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return

Author

Joseph O'Brien

Publish Date

Feb. 28, 2018

Joseph O’Brien is poetry editor and staff writer for the San Diego Reader.

March’s Lovely Asymptotes

The property line melts into forest, its late winter browns
Like a beast’s pelt; oaks hunched like sleeping bear;

Beech and birch extend into ugly candid possum hair,
And elms and maples muster into a passel of woodchuck.

The air waited on first signs of spring, curling up like smoke
Through your lips — petals thin as pencils, yet capable of shape

And form; they’re forced into a smile by a late March sleep
That’s going too late for April showers. The ice is glassed

Over, bonding yesterday afternoon’s puddles into a crust,
The gouged march of cattle habitual for bleak pasture;

The frozen prints are filmy, each a black and white fish-eyed fissure
That gazes up from feathery hooks to ultimate grey; outside

We’ve come to test the meadows and taste the weather, greyed
As tombs. Embraced by down and wool, we try hard to ignore

The vestiges of conversational winter, snow that quipped before
In patches defers now to gelid mud. The quiet of the fire

In the parlor stove lives on — but questions hang in the air
Beyond their usefulness — the organic smell of summer cotton

Released as a felt presence in the room by the heat of an iron.
So thickly dressed for outdoors, you, woman or man; your feet

Deliberate with feminine pause, your eyes have decided to fight
The urge to ever meet on the issue but maintain differences

Like valleys that separate the hills with everlasting distances.
With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return, bounding

The fields with pump-handled pinions rising, falling, finding
Their shadows threading like dolphins through a splintered sea.

You look up at them and their shadows across the valley.
Your smile relaxes, warms up, shares the sky and ground with no one.

Your glance takes in the entire landscape without love, but then
You allow that spring may overwhelm us any moment; I gather

Your silhouette by heart; it is the short memory of ice. The weather
Is turning chalky blue. (The day’s vanishing point held us where we stood.)

A slight breeze stirs the sleeping forest from its impenetrable mood;
The cold air pushes our shadows together. We page through the horizon

To search for once-familiar trees, now a woodpile almost forgotten.

Persephone

Imagine time the place where shadows grow
Divine, and spread like fans that winnow noon
From dawn — and dusk from rotting bones in snow —
What marks the melting margins of the sun.

Then conjure thoughts of breadth: from apse
And nave to chthonic crypt, from heaven’s womb
To Hades’ tomb. What fires the cold synapse?
(What Aprils march to February’s doom?)

The nothing left is less than chaff — a creed
Of stones. What’s gone is everything that lasts:
The bittersweet and many-seeded need
To see beyond the light that darkness casts.

Where ice has borrowed, spring is lent away:
A princess comes to live in exile’s realms,
Her pert magnificence at close of day —
Though holding fast, reveals — and overwhelms.

Joseph O’Brien lives on a homestead with his wife and nine children in rural Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin. He is poetry editor and staff writer (Set ’Em Up, Joe! and Sheep and Goats) for the San Diego Reader.

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Like a beast’s pelt: oaks hunched like sleeping bear

With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return

March’s Lovely Asymptotes

Persephone

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Like a beast’s pelt: oaks hunched like sleeping bear

With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return

Like a beast’s pelt: oaks hunched like sleeping bear

With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return

Like a beast’s pelt: oaks hunched like sleeping bear

With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return

March’s Lovely Asymptotes

Persephone

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Like a beast’s pelt: oaks hunched like sleeping bear

With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return

March’s Lovely Asymptotes

Persephone

The latest copy of the Reader

Could Supplemental Security Income house the homeless?

Now what can they do with Encinitas unstable cliffs?

Subscribe and stay in touch

Like a beast’s pelt: oaks hunched like sleeping bear

With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return

Like a beast’s pelt: oaks hunched like sleeping bear

With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return

Like a beast’s pelt: oaks hunched like sleeping bear

With half-hearted barking, geese announce their return

March’s Lovely Asymptotes

Persephone

Featured Local Savings

The latest copy of the Reader

Trophy truck crushes four at Baja 1000

Ramona musicians seek solution for outdoor playing at wineries

Subscribe and stay in touch

Menu.

Find a story.

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.