Helen of Troy Meets Her First Husband
A poem for Wednesday
as in the dampest part of winter, when rain
flushes down from a sky
with spring growing in its eye like a cataract
not yet thick enough to film,
wetting branches already spongy with snowmelt
and too old to bargain another year’s sap
from the mother trunk,
and the wind blows with sudden exclamation
against the topmost bough,
and that bough tumbles down,
knocking here and there and falling square against
a second limb, snapping it from the tree,
and both limbs
—sopped with rot and soft with death—
drop together to the pine-needle core of the forest floor
and lie one atop the other, unmoving and jointly locked,
decomposing by turns—just so
did i first lay eyes on him. just so did we begin.
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