April 2025 - Crosswise

Typically, National Poetry Month is a time of celebration here in our singularly literary neighborhood. Yet, this April is, as Joanne DeSimone Reynolds writes, “a hard March.”  For many of us now, seemingly everything from the global to the quotidian is infused with anxiety.  Even poetry, even spring’s awakening. What will be the fate of unfettered language, we wonder. What of nature? Yet, as this month’s poem reminds us, the balm of art still abides even in the most anxious of times.

Crosswise

by Joanne DeSimone Reynolds

Sometimes a pinecone on a path sometimes a trail of pine needles you track

on up past a pond a hill thicker there with trees not yet green

you wear tall boots blue jeans a long-sleeved shirt fearing ticks

like smoke signals a voice you hope will rise ‘round the pond again

a falls a small brook toward some espaliered fruit trees

buds still tight fretting a vegetable patch raspberry bramble at the back of

a farmhouse its canes its bedraggled leaves like flags

of defeat across a road at the front of the house an orchard like a crowd

posing withholding too a rutted path beside it bees hiving in a box

hoarding warmth and silence an Adam and an Eve having made all this

possible him seeding her pruning somewhere off a harmony

in relief a clearing like a scene out of Viet Nam as if you’d ever even

been there boring into you

a plow ditched a canvas cover shredded at the edges of the mouth

of a shed a stillness undercut by what could be

birdwing though you haven’t seen any today not even a heron’s stitching

a gray wool across the sky a hole a chipmunk’s near a leafing

a purplish bit at the tippy-top a maybe-soon-to-be bloom

April is a hard March and you want so much to be free of frost you’ll

kneel

pinecones pine needles dust all crushed on the path all the color of rust

flame spring rains cannot master

you heard two swans

live out their fidelity on the marsh the greening is just beginning she’d said

a trail a path the tracks you double back on past the orchard toward the road again

Joanne De Simone Reynolds was a long-time participant of Plein Air Poetry at Old Frog Pond Farm. More recently she has been an ekphrastic poetry participant in Art On The Trails at Beals Preserve in Southborough, Massachusetts. She won first prize in poetry in 2022 and was poetry judge in 2023. Her series of sixteen ekphrastic poems for 2020 Art Ramble, in Concord, Ma, can be viewed online alongside images of the sculptures at theumbrellaarts.org.