Untitled Poem By Molly Kirschner

Untitled

Old leaves survived, dead, well into spring.

I’ve outlived myself again.

Spring snow in the park buries its groundlings

but makes trees regal with useless pearlescence.

It’s beautiful, I know, rationally.

But my eye’s on that girl’s homework that’s escaped

pen, hand, assiduous attention,

is cartwheeling its freedom into the kind of weather

that’s lethal to paper.

And the light wants me happy, wants me gooseberry-sweet,

is forcing its bodyweight on that impassive cloud,

which locks like a bedroom door between us--

a sick mother who can’t risk exposure to germs,

and her lovesick six-year-old daughter.

With a fickle glitter on a building it reminds me what it once did:

the magic-trick of joy that takes away the need for purpose--

it reminds me

like an older woman who needs me to see what she looked like

when she was my age. But I know. I was there.

I was a goldenberry under that light.