SPRING MELT
They separate in March:
the first of our friends
to decide on divorce.
We tiptoe around the month;
we’ve been fighting,
too. Our house is an
over-starched shirt.
The month is dark with rain,
the streets all slick
like sadness. We wait,
rarely patient, for a thaw,
for our hands to unknot
into hands again. But
our friends are an ice floe
breaking apart in spring’s
thick current. We pull
the muck of winter
from the gutters, hope
the water runs clean again;
nothing more than this:
we hold onto each other
like upturned boats—
even if cold can never
really go away, even if
we might always feel the frost
at the edges of our bodies.
—from Rattle #27, Summer 2007
__________
Katherine Bode-Lang: “I’m a recent MFA graduate from Penn State, and live in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, with my husband, Andrew, and our cat, Grace. When I’m not teaching or writing, I’m a volunteer book mender at the county library.”
