Ice Gone

Ice Gone

by Teresa Stores

On this morning, the river that accompanies me, my dawn
departure, my daily drive just begun, is free,
ice dam broken in the night into white
boulders walling the water way, opening
into the lake called Retreat Meadows.

Some times it is like this: You wake up to solstice,
a late-March morning, suddenly sixty, earth
smelling of earth, after a long hard cold, years
lost, it seems, after a midnight pounding
rain, and, encounter change, like a soul, stilled

and run-off muddied, dark and smooth and still. The ice is simply gone.
Fishing shanties, skidded hastily ashore, not yet
trucked home to be overgrown by summer behind
the barn, tilt akimbo, uncertain, toward
the highway, toward Retreat Meadows,

toward me, my destination.

-refers from the word home in Joel Peckham’s non-fiction piece Flight