March 2014
/To the Constant Season
Lunenburg, 2012
by Zachary Bos
Frost on the marsh grass this morning,
and a line of crows flying over.
Time for praising what fills the year
with transitoriness: the cold,
the scarcity of food, changing
in the angle of the sunlight;
for praising the iron cycles
the birds read as Time to move on;
for praising what makes the singing
of the music of the woods of
gladful songbird April nothing
like burnt October birdsong—like
the hink-hawnk of the coughing geese
enlarging and diminishing
as they come in vees and go, gone;
like the sound of the hawks leaving;
like clouds of straw-crowned chaffinches
alighting on branchtips, melting
into the brushwork of the bush
waiting hidden until duskfall
when they flock through the dark, going
to some elsewhere where they’ll be new
for a few days or weeks, passing
over or through, never staying,
never always here, always just
missed. Till… nearly here again. When
the lilacs bud bright again and
the beautiful birds, thank it all,
unmigrate, come back to unwatch
the constant burial of fall,
cover the skytop nakedness
with their numbers in returning.
Zachary Bos is a founder of Pen & Anvil Press, the publishing enterprise of the non-profit Boston Poetry Union. An alumnus of the graduate poetry program at Boston University, his poetry has appeared most recently in Bellevue Literary Review, Spare Change, Route 2, Oddball Magazine, and Found Magazine.