spring to winter, winter to spring

Spokane was in the mid-fifties yesterday and sunny. Spring felt so near! I spent a couple hours on the porch replanting succulents and, to be honest, ended up with a bit of a chill. Despite all the hopeful sunshine, fifty-two degrees is not exactly t-shirt weather. Silly me. And today is positively dreary. Wind and gray skies for hours and hours. So, I felt the need for a stark little poem today. Thus, "Peach Fires"...

via Oh. Pioneer!

PEACH FIRES

BY DAVID ST. JOHN

Out in the orchards the dogs stood

Almost frozen in the bleak spring night

& Mister dragged out into the rows

Between his peach trees the old dry limbs

Building at regular intervals careful pyres

While the teeth of the dogs chattered & snapped

& the ice began to hang long as whiskers

From the globes along the branches

& at his signal we set the piles of branches ablaze

Tending each carefully so as not to scorch

The trees as we steadily fed those flames

Just enough to send a rippling glow along

Those acres of orchard where that body—

Sister Winter—had been held so wisely to the fire

from The Place That Inhabits Us, Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010, via the Poetry Foundation