Colin Bailes

Winter

Lately, the mornings

are no longer numinous—

but today:

two pileated woodpeckers

outlined against

the magnolia trunk,

their black silhouette

and red-feathered

crowns framed in morning motes.

Their caterwauling resonated

through the yard,

penetrated the sunroom—

the whole trunk

aflame in sunlight.

                        *

An antique from Maman,

my mother’s grandmother, the wooden letterpress drawer

hangs on the wall

in my parents’ living room, tiny display boxes

filled with miniatures—

a baguette, thumb-sized, wrapped in wax paper

next to a milk bottle

with riveted top, dried seahorses,

a bobbin and thimble, pewter angels,

whelk and cowrie shells,

a wooden rocking horse, and a Delft-blue water pitcher.

Rusted over, the nails joining the compartments

are otherwise pristine, still perform

their intended purpose. They will outlive us.

                        *

All around me

I watched the world change—

strands of bald cypress

breaking into sky, leaves turning,

exposing chalk-white trunks, twisted twigs,

a silver matrix of branches.

Above the treeline:

a band of blue,

welter of clouds, white-washed

and churning,

low on the horizon.

                        *

Visiting our grandparents

one Christmas in northern Louisiana,

my brother and I tried,

beneath a maple tree

in their front yard,

to catch fireflies in our hands.

Our first time

ever seeing them, the bugs

flashed in one place

as we reached out to grasp them

then disappeared, reappearing

a few feet away

only to vanish again.

                        *

During the last months

of my grandfather’s life he refused,

either from stubbornness

or weakness, to leave his recliner.

He took to urinating

in glass mason jars. My father, tending

after him, would take

into his hands

each jar and empty

the contents into the toilet.

When I visit my father now,

I notice his hair shot with silver, his hands

covered in liver spots,

the yellowing of his toenails—

how his appearance

alters with each meeting.

                        *

In spring, the tree repeats itself—

form destroyed only to be restored.

Our lives are never cyclical.

We follow one path, beginning and end—a bead

dragged in one direction along a string.

Emma Aylor