Marks

In this gentlest month
(autumn of spring,
springtime of summer),
I visit the home place.
The kindness of May
touches everything:
the redbuds' fading purple,
the greening gold
of softly leafing trees,
the heat's first summer dusting
over cloud speckled miles.

Near the waterway,
soft white blossoms
lift in air near locust thorns
vicious in length.
A wren chatters. Red-wingeds
scold from short treetops.
The stream bank,with its
fold of emerald blades hides also
tongues of poison ivy.

For days after I leave again,
I walk with feet stained
by their first bare moving
over rough, beloved earth.
I carry a splinter in my thumb,
and a sense, a lily-of-the-valley
essence, of something 
 strong, sweet, and passing.