Snow lay atop the boxwoods
all winter,
lather on skin,
and shielded
the sand cherry’s branches.
Now the dead wood
splinters when I pull,
and the leaves have bronzed
early. What should be neon-
red this sunset’s
glimmerless, a girl
too long neglected.
On the south slope
January comes—
Lake Erie finds its way
and waits.
I read it’s part rose,
part shade, where my father
used to sit and study
the broadening pin-oak.
The final spring he lived
it shone hot pink,
the blood of the lawn
he watched grow
nights like this,
nights in a chair with coffee,
the hedge a memory,
the trellis empty
of the purples we knew as kids.
Today I drew away
as much of the dead as I could.
My wrists grew furious
cutting, aligning, motioning
to corners of the yard
unseen in decades.
I stood back,
then I moved forward
as my father might’ve,
at peace with what remained.
Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Burnt Pine, Two Peach, Lunch Ticket, and Poetry Quarterly. He is also a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee.
Foxglove Journal 