Three Poems

News

What are the trees waiting for? This morning
I awoke and the frost had made everything stiff
with its white arthritis, and the sky was still pale
the half-awake sun yet to crank itself over the hill.

And then because of your shock, discovering the news
(which meant I was kind to you, clearing the ice
from your car with a poisonous hiss of anti-freeze spray,
cursing myself for not doing the right thing

and using elbow grease and an empty CD, let alone
telling you when I first got to know, so it didn't come out
this way, wrong time, when you had somewhere to go)
I missed the sky turning blue, and when I next looked

there were the trees, still as stones but unlike stones, waiting
as if holding breath, as if holding back the release
of an aggression of muscle, bunched tight beneath bark
...