The Unusual Clarity of a Changing Season

i. Summer

My mother’s last loveless summer was largely the same as any other. The breeze wedged itself into broken glass and creaked the old house. Cousins replenished the halls’ rusted pictures shaking with their echoing laughs. Aunts unbuttoned shirts, creased into folded chairs to read their books. Sunlight seeped into my mother and my skin as it always had, casting warm, iridescent shades of olive-brown.

Summer sagged, drifting in languor.

My mother locked the door to take calls;

Her laugh, light, rising, slipped through hallways,

Loose blonde curls twirling ‘round her finger.

My mother was in love.

ii. Fall

Fall tightened the city's hinges loosened by summer’s heat. Freedom shrank into the sleeves of new sweaters and old friends. Leaves streaked trees a red-orange-yellow; the color of  a setting sun, a throbbing heart. 

A strange currency bent through our apartment walls,

As my mother’s voice took a softer form of itself.

The word, “David,” slid off the tongue,

Eluding to her feverish love, one, she promised,

I too soon would find.

Strange how I grew resentful over his voice,

How it seeped easily into her ears, melted into her heart, 

Yet evaded mine.

Her new, gentle, leveled parenting, Her fresh, illustrious confidence,

Irked me as signs of a love

I no longer reserved. 

iii. Winter

Slowly, winter hugs the city’s naked trees. The weather a furrowing, gnawing cold, overflows in every crevice of my world. The days are shorter, nature leaving itself time to shelter, masking the world in patterned stillness.

A man with whom my mother’s love is contained,

Now seeks mine as well.

A stranger, made familiar to 

The shifting contours of my soul. 

Perhaps love in addition to, not 

Instead of;

I grow in a confluence of new love and old.

iv. Spring

The first sign of spring will be light followed by life.

Change leaves no time for rest

Yet for love it just might.