TELL ME AGAIN WHEN EASTER IS

TELL ME AGAIN WHEN EASTER IS
B.D. Fischer

My South’s on the verge
of sweating weather,
but my big question
is whether the heather

will flourish
and flower
off the back porch
of my former manor,

where my mother still trades
in excuses
and blather.

*

In the four-seasoned year
the comfort of coming
sporadically soothes
a maternal mind’s racing,

and beneath still the snows
of a blightborn winter
my mother now calls me
back from the hinter-

lands of the South
of the north
where she lingers.

*

It’s been a season for her
of blurry snow showers,
and the four-seasoned year
will meander and wander,

my mother now calls me
back from the hinters
of what she insists is
the south of the North,

for advice
on the maintenance
of our old rhododendrons.

*

We planted them together
in the summer of the year
that my older sister Heather
might have left behind her fear

and gone to college.  If not
for the accident.   Skiing.
Then my father’s departure,
an understandable fleeing

that left us whittled
to stalk and root
but no leaves.

*

I played three sets
(winning only one)
on Jesus’ birthday
when it should have been

cold.  And these equinox
changes are even worse,
nostalgia laid out
like a beckoning hearse

in the face of which
there’s nothing to say
to the woman who begged me
and begged me to stay.

Imagine my toleration.
There was an ancient
departing.  Furniture moved.
A job taken; and I went

south, by train,
then by marriage,
and still these damn
seasons, the New English

winter of vacancy fields
of a turn toward nature,
and the Tar Heel tincture
of New Hampshire’s yields.

©2012 This work is the property of the author.