Dear After

 The resurrection fern, down-curled

and drought-crisp,

waits dry in a grey between,

then, when water

steeps it again, revives to evergreen.

In limbo it thrives,

patient, like the wood frog

whose eggy body

freezes solid in winter, its blood

a tangled icicle.

Though heart and brain clink

like crystal and stop

their vital work, livingness,

somewhere inside,

lives. Thaws with the brook silt

and starts back up.

It goes on. Just like that. And water

fills the dirt-brown fern to green.

Dear After, I don’t know what

to ask for,

I don’t know where this

correspondence goes.

My love sleeps warm

            beside me.

Someday soon or not soon,

for one of us

then the other, this query will

become an elegy.

Remind me it’s possible to feel

this this.

It’s possible for atoms to disperse

as they will,

by all evidence scattered,

while

a frond of warmth,

the long fact of it,

holds, like a body’s imprint

in its bed.

“Dear After” was originally published in Northern New England Review and has also appeared in “Poems from Here” on Maine Public radio.