Last April, carrying on the breeze,
the plaintive, downward, doubled note
of calling phoebe accompanied you, exploring
woods back of the adjacent rubbish heap.
Among Clorox bottles and the delicate,
pale blue hepatica nestled in
the dead-leaf blanket, a tenuous thin
sapling grew, whose red buds clinging
to new twigs puzzled you until
the five white fingers of the flowers unclasped,
soft, wrinkled, as if just wet.

In the guidebook, the names connected
these flowers to the movement of shad
from ocean into rivers, hinting
that the distant underwater pulse was felt
in the tendrils of this edge-of-the-wood-tree.
And you chose the name, Shadblow—
more, perhaps, for a two-note euphony
than any suggestion of wind the old minds
must have felt to bind fertility
of flower and fish, as if one
were the good promise of another.

But what is the spring to a man kicked out
of his job at Circuit City,
weeks before the child is due?
That some stranger can make a choice
over a column of figures, and you
and a hundred others find your lives
changed; that your whole life can be contained—
(your own hand feeling the swell
of Ann's belly, or circling a phoebe
quivering among chimney ashes, or just
fine-tuning the stereo dial)—contained
in a point on a graph, a speck of light
on a terminal screen:
what force has the spring to transform
that black-and-white world?

I remember you were the first—
on school nights under the seared
skies outside Newark and Manhattan—
to name for me what could still be seen
of constellations, that old power of mind
that knew the sky as men, women, animals,
and gave life to otherwise neutral stars;
while we now fear the straight line
the dot of a satellite draws above your trees
can mean the will of abstracted thrones—
Government, Economy, Security—
who may decide that we can be
dismissed, anonymously as the old
knowledge was let go, as the shad
die off in the rivers.

Things still grow. Things return: through a wind
bringing fish to rivers, flowers to riverbank,
is no more than a tentative breath,
and to hear it involves a steady,
determined waging—a kind of war.
On your own, expelled, you struggle:
yet a year later the slim tree blooms,
and before all the petals have blown down,
Ann can walk with you in the woods again—
under a light blanket she holds
a new, delicate, two-note breathing.