Annual

All over Greensboro, fireplaces harbor a rime 
                         of soot. The seams of the sidewalk
            have crusted with ice again, and 
 
droplets on the plum trees too
                         are opaque white pebbles, stalled
             by nights that still freeze—
 
only now it's more out of habit 
                         than conviction; at dawn
            the birds take up and the sun's
 
gleam through new growth 
                         slivers the neighborhood with gold. 
            How can spring, each morning of it, 
 
still surprise me? 
                         Look at me, I'm new!
            it says in front of my old brick house
 
where Nina and Julia arrived
                         just a few winters back, to collect me (sleep-deprived, 
            milk-heavy) to walk. 
 
To get out of our heads, we said. 
                         All of us trying to write something 
            that would last, in the off-hours
 
between drop-off and pick-up.
                         We gave up sugar, ferried parents to hospitals, 
            compared babysitters, read books like How to Live. 
 
Saying it this way, as if it's gone, makes us 
                         any women, 
            but those mornings felt bright, just born,
 
and we the only three such, 
                         as now we are still alone, 
            singular, staring out at the yard 
 
or bunkered at the desk 
                         or bundled—Nina—
            into an urn on John's mantel. 
 
She died last spring before dawn.
                         Let's not make that a metaphor. 
            Anyway I'm wrong—she was scattered at sea. 
 
Still, the forsythia comes back to us, 
                         and the persisting 
            morning ice, and sun melting it.