The declination of the sun tips towards us again
As February moves towards March
And the ducks are soon active on the mill pond
Before the ice has completely melted away.
The drakes beset the ducks when spring is still an idea
Imagined in the angle of the sunlight.
The predatory snapping turtle still sleeps in the mud below,
For fifty years or more rising later in the spring to devour the ducklings.
As I imagine the idea of someone new, of an intimate relationship,
As if we have lived shared experiences in a parallel past,
As if she knows my heart and I hers. It is possible.
After all, spring is on the way.
She has her pond, too, not the same pond, but not so different,
Left there by the receding glacier as part of that Long Island,
Part of that huge pile of billions of round stones that is the island now.
On her pond the swans nest and lose their cygnets to another large turtle.
Her swan is not the lustful Zeus swan who raped Leda.
Her swan is female, tenderly hatching the eggs,
As if Leda was transformed into a swan by the experience,
And her offspring each spring tragically get devoured, one by one.
And what would bring us together now, more or less sixty years old?
There is the bittersweet sorrow of our losses, each our own.
There is the eye for fleeting beauty in the world around us.
There is the dream of a companion’s embrace.
For her the stars and stones somehow conflate. I do not understand.
I think the stones break bones and words can hurt, too.
I think there is deep pain there but it is not my metaphor.
At times she is too abstract for me.
A humanist feminist: that’s good for me in theory.
It’s not an intellectual act, though, and not an act of will.
What the heart feels is like a dream, not a rational argument,
And trust and courage are matters of the heart, mine and hers.
