Northern summer

by Joanna Wright

The year comes home at summer,
lays her cloth over lean boughs,               
demands a story. Even the hawthorns
clam up, hide their telltale blossom
in dry fists. Hard won, all of it —
ice scissored through the river leaving scars.
Ask my advice?  Discard those memories:
let the rowans fondle everything
with green, let the aspens dwell
in their own reflections. Enough
that we are here, that the water's grown
its little voice, that the sky closes
out the sunlight, that in order not to hear
each other, everything hums.