Al Maginnes
How It Comes To Us First day of spring and a forecast for snow or freezing rain. The plants too wise to have sprouted curl quiet under cold mud. Close to here, a boy dreams of hitting baseballs in high arcs over a flawless green outfield. Somewhere a man turns his car key, hears only dry grinding under the hood. We live in a world of things determined to break promises: cars, little machines, marriages. I could tell you about the repairman who just shook his head and said, “Get a new TV.” I have told stories of times weather was betrayal, like the time your mother and I expected to wake to a morning bedded under snow. But the ground was bare, the air iron-cold, giving me a day to work in frozen mud, lashed with cold wind. Those days passed. The slow engine of spring turns and we are briefly held in the perfection I began to believe in the first time I saw you.
51
