Ten minutes ago lightning struck Lake Ontario.
The bolt edged the crown of a neighbour’s birch tree
then craned a hard vertical plunge over the shore cliff.
The starlings, dug into their cliffside holes,
feathered engines of erosion, were briefly illuminated
in the way of Cro Magnon and paleolithic shadow toss.
The rain pelted the shorebirds. That was ten minutes ago.
Now, the clouds are peripheral, sun is central, colours alight.
The year’s first cloud of midges spears above the grass
startling in the way of an eye-level asteroid field.
Starlings swoop. Cycles begin.
One plum tree considers blossoms. Nine more plums
consider the merits of pointillism, their bud clusters greening
only in slivers; but aggregates insinuate leaf clouds,
as do the starlings each streak, until they give shape to murmuration.
Spring is a season that does not descend, nor does it know direction.
Spring has a thousand-thousand origins, all precise points.
Here on the Niagara Peninsula, a mosaic that will not be equaled,
until the escarpment falls one orange leaf in its own minute.
Canadian researcher Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, Dalhousie Review, untethered, Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, American Mathematical Monthly, M58, CV2, Brittle Star, Lascaux Review, Carmina, Progenitor, Muleskinner, Sulphur, Northridge Review, Ex-Puritan, Perceptions, Granfalloon, Literary Hatchet, Calliope, New Note, Confetti, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and more. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for grant funding during the polycrisis.
Euphony Journal 