No one knows what birds can remember.

And yet, to every house

 

two always return, mouths full of nesting

glue from blue island wintering.

 

A village leaves windows unscreened and kitchen

rafters clear for another year’s pair. And if

 

the swallows are late, so is the planting,

so the entire season.

 

Every year runs a different length,

measured in scythes of returning wings.

 

Every year stretches and releases

time in restless trumpeting approaches.

 

Rice planting is wet work. Ankles deep

in paddies to dig up, bundle,

 

and toss seedlings into new beds,

like moving infants from their cribs.

 

Water softens the heels like it softens

the burned bottom of a pot,

 

eventually releasing one surface

from another—crust from pan, or the first

 

layer of skin from flesh.

Each day the heart slows, the body

 

releases its time.  Each sunrise takes

minutes off. If a body gives in

to delay, the late sewn rice still
uncoils its reed, the grain

 

still starches the belly, and still a body

can lie down in provincial dusk,

 

a few minutes gathered

and scattered into the rows it digs.

 

 

 

 

 

What strand of mandevilla does not reach

blue flower, we cut.  And the ones full

or nearing bloom, we cut.

To overwinter, we hang the shrubs bald

and upside down in the dark.

Some dormant life remains to drink

a gallon every two weeks.

By March, they will take soil again.

Perhaps neither they nor we should grow

where we cannot shorten our own roots.

Perhaps there are mouths of land we cannot have

if we cannot scale back our branches

or seal our own cracks.  Already we know

we cannot slow our pulse to wait out

hunger. Our young cry in all seasons.

Neither can the mandevilla stop

sending flowers to bud, even into the iced air,

even for fear that every petal will release

and make no mark where it lands.