Fiddleheads
On that particular hillside,
the fog arrives over these three days
in five different bodies
like a shapeshifting god--
fairy wisp,
clan of snakes,
liquid wind,
lovers' arms,
queen's full repose.
They tour the villages of private miseries.
In the high hills,
the fog mists over the darkened bedroom windows
of the dozen girls here
with bowed legs and sunken eyes
who dread portioned meals.
It curls around the contemporary facade
of a house full of pacing and blame-throwing,
where the phone registers
the pleas of the novice addict:
the stolen wallet, the blind eye, the never again.
In the low hills,
it brushes past the crumbling apartments--
one earthquake from surrender--
of the young lover
dieting on Ativan and vodka
and the woman
who lost her son, her sister, and her mind
all at once.
At the edge of the cloud,
between the water and the ridge,
is our house,
the children waiting at the window.
I try to imagine what can hold
this immense, provincial ache.
Something in the mist
sets my mind on fiddleheads,
how they turn in so perfectly to hold
their own fragility.
The head of the leaf, the extremities,
the skin and spores,
all one embrace
and shield.
In their season,
thousands of fiddleheads
dwell in the hills outside this window,
fortresses of tortuous waiting
and coming release.
