Spring Beauties

Look, Momma, sping booties, sping booties!

~Sage Magdelene, age 3

It is not Groundhog Day exactly.

There are major mistakes to right. I cannot.

No endless re-tries or deadening repetitions.

No escape. It is just these seven small rooms,

full of the dust and scent of living—coffee,

salty sheets, cut pine, March dog, wood smoke.

It is these sandy trails where daily I greet

my own shoe tread of yesterday,

notice my gait, step off-register, new.

It is the real smile in my love’s morning eyes,

that softness he reserves for me, my hands.

It is my body remembering three toddlers’

heft in night dreams, that sweet grief.

It is the checking of screens for evidence

of their fractal lives spinning presence

off of me, our curving Mandelbrot set

of mothers, my first grandchild sprouting.

It is the digital taking-in of their encounters

with simple, complicated, horrible beauty,

that glimpse of what they do, now grown,

with epigenetic inheritance, that best thing

I had to give. Look, I would say. Look.

This little pink flower, this bliss, this thick sadness,

this roaring rage, let’s look at it together,

squat before it pink and green on solid feet,

shake songs from chromosomal chains and winter.

Let’s sigh, touch the fragile petals.

They won’t stay long. Look, there they go.