One Acre Yard
(Fargo, North Dakota)

April - we have missed the thaw by days;
the yard rolls pale in its narrow palette
of oatmeals and ochre; only the spruce
busks its darkness down each limit.

All that has fallen these months
now gains at last the effortless glory
of standstill, dropped through the slush
those last redemptive inches; the story

twisting in its final paragraphs, debris settling:
these beer tins, deer scat, thrawn branks
of a long-rooted plum tree; a frozen raven
who has wintered here on his black back

welcomes the sun and softens, unzips
his coat to show his bones and basks
as warmth infects the air; the terrier inspects
her tenth season of this snow-stung grass.

And us. We walk the acre arm in arm,
still melting from our shyness, to the river
freshened and shirring at its banks, all harm
on ice and the worst of winters over.