May 8, 2018

willing the blooms

I had been watching the tree in the front yard, hoping the town crew
wouldn't think it ailing (which it probably is), and come rumbling down
the road with blades in the beds of their trucks. The cherry
blossomed late this season, keeping its buds in check until the final snow
left last month, and I rose one morning to a flood of white flowers on the branches,
the petals nearly arrogant with beauty. The first warm rain came through a week later,
wind swaying the power lines in a do-si-do. I watched from a porch window, willing
the blooms to hang on, which of course they couldn't entirely. Weather doesn't work
like that. Instead, what was cleaved from the tree lay pliant below it, absent of the injury
I'd imagined and instead, softened by the fall, nearly weeping, it seemed, from relief.