The Spring Ephemerals

David Baker

Here she comes with her face to be kissed. Here she comes
lugging two plastic sacks looped over her arms and stuffed

with fresh shoots. It's barely dawn. She's been out
for an hour already, digging up what she can save

before developers raze the day's lot sites and set
woodpiles ablaze. That's their plan for the ninety-plus acres.

She squats in the sun to show me wild phlox
in pink-running-to-blue, rue anemone, masses

of colt's foot, wild ginger, blood root and may-
apples, bracken and fiddlehead fern-ferns being not

spring ephemerals, per se, but imperiled by road-graders
come to shave the shaded slopes where they grow.

Once I held her in a snow cover of sheets. Wind beat
the world, while we listened. Her back was a sail

unfurling. She wanted me to touch stitches there,
little scabs, where doctors had sliced the sick cells

and cauterized her skin for safety's sake.
Now her hands are spotted by briars, bubbles of blood

daubed in brown. She's got burrs in her red hair.
Both sleeves are torn. She kneels as the sunlight

cuts through pine needles above us, casting a grid
like the plats the surveyors use. It's the irony


of every cell: that it divides to multiply.
This way the greedy have bought up the land

behind ours to parcel for resale at fifty-
fold what they paid weeks ago.

It's a race to outrun their gas cans and matches,
to line the path to our creek with transplants

of spice bush, yellow fawn-lily, to set aside space
in the garden for the frail. She adjusts the map

she's drawn of the tumbling woods- where each
flower and fern come from, under what tree, beside

which ridge. Dysfunctional junctional nevus:
a name like a bad joke for the growth on her skin,

pigment too pale for much sunlight. Drooping trillium,
she says, handing me a cluster of roots, unfolding leaves-

rare around here. How delicate, a trillium,
whose oils are food for ants, whose sessile leaves are

palm-sized, tripartite. They spread a shadow over
each stem's fragile one bloom, white in most cases,

though this one's maroon. This makes it rarer.
It hangs like a red bell safe from the sun. It bends

like our necks bend, not in grief, not prayer,
as we work with our backs to the trees, as they burn.