Aubade, with no lover departing at dawn

In the crosshatched branches she sees a cardinal’s tufted red flag: and what it suggests is not spring, but how nothing in the neighborhood resembles the watery grid of rice fields, especially when the tips of new shoots emerge like stitches feathered in neat rows. At the corner, school girls gather in the cold, snapping their hair bands, twisting and untwisting their hair into ponytails. From their mouths, little spirals of frost; their quick fingers, their gestures that say they’re not considering things that will get harder with age. Not right now. The clouds are nubbed as a pilled flannel blanket. The bus comes into view: a yellow apostrophe, starting and stopping down the long avenue. Soon it takes them away, and they are not necessarily thinking of mistrust. A stray bird’s cadenza reminds her it is time to review the questions she has asked every day for most of her life.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.