It’s in the drift of instances, behavior. Like Carol
looking every chance she gets—
and that is at least daily in our walks to the mailbox—she
looking for the yellow moccasin flower
that we both thought we saw in its early spring fronds,
now lost,
maybe among the undergrowth,
the lushness of poison ivy,
or maybe just gone.
Or the look of the birch, autumn topped
even this late in spring—early in summer—
from last year’s drought,
fall having taken hold of the treetops as early as August.
The birch over there on the left of the road
dead, it seems, for its last thirty feet into the sky,
one lower limb greened out with something like hope.
It’s all in the drift of instances, like
one season’s promise of life a prelude to death,
the promise of interlude last fall a prelude
to growthlessness this season.
Instances grow together,
grow backward sometimes,
to make incomplete for us what Nature
suits herself, not us, to finish.