Matt Thomas
ANNIVERSARY POEM II

Remember the tracked snow
it was last to melt
and so was like a suture
in the flattened grass,
Robins feeding
impression to impression
hashes as if marking time passed
from The Incident
that dried the trees,
brooded a generation of change
in their damped, stubborn ashes

& then, as if voicing that fire,
The Crack
of a stick giving to your weight
panicked the Robins.
We watched them scatter,
black thrown seeds,
the press of your taut belly
a hard pressure at both of our spines

We felt it then, but never said,
how love, like snow, is a tension
between transition
and the late present
misremembered as stillness

By now it goes without saying,
all of the lessons
to short, illogical ends
we’ve hefted and carried
from forest to meadow and back

Matt Thomas is a smallholder farmer, engineer, and environmentalist. His work has appeared recently in Dunes Review and Bear Paw Arts Journal, and is upcoming in Hiram Review and the Avalon Literary Review. He lives with his family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

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