Threshold

For Margaret

 

When the sunrise spread

blooms 

across the snow 

and painted the window

in almost spring

 

you fingered the stories looped

round your neck,

strung up like 

pearls

or teeth, depending

 

each moment a threshold

that marked her 

passing

in the swing of a door,

or a sunlit floor,

or the wind of a hand

grown cold

in your own.

 

But today in the hemlocks

you look up

perhaps

for another taste of that sweet light

and know instead

 

not her eyes, vacant,

but the current of a soul blowing 

past your own pane,

lifting the branches toward 

the bright sanctuary 

of movement

 

where at the glassy edge of 

stillness 

you, in a whirl of

dawning endings,

crack 

and rise to meet it,

crossing on a breath 

that no frame

can contain.

 

Are we not 

each of us a window,

thrown open?