A Spell to Get Back Home

I’ll tell you what we’re going to do:
sit on the hill and watch the clouds’
blue shadows move across the mountains,
then we’ll walk to the pond
picking up downed branches along the way.
The peepers are piping down,
nearly finished with spring.
We’ll take the drive 10 minutes north
past the backyard hockey rink melted
to a shallow pool, past the row of houses
with months’ worth of trash
sagging their front porches, the one
with a tattered tarp for a roof.
We’ll go to the garden center called
Dandelion Acres. The grass is still brown.
The tips of branches are just showing red buds
where leaves won’t unfurl until next month.
But we’ll go, for early bulbs and seeds
and the humid, soil–scented air of the greenhouse;
a fieldtrip to late June. We’ll stop for coffee
by the river, then check the PO box,
its glass door and brass dial we were so enamored with
eight months ago when we first moved here.
Back up through fields to the red house
at the knob of the hill—1476 feet.
Wind tangles the chimes.
We’ll put the herbs on a sunny sill,
bury tulip bulbs.
I honestly don’t know how many springs we’ll see
green blades push through just–thawed soil;
what with squirrels and our own penchant for uprooting.
We’ll hike to the sheltered spot
littered with white quartz like permanent snow.
No wind, but the sound of wind
high in the branches, knocking wood.

Sarah Sousa is the author of five poetry collections, most recently See the Wolf, published by CavanKerry Press, and the chapbook Yell, published by C&R Press. Her poems have been published in in the Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Verse Daily, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. She lives in Vermont.