Four Poems by Alison Hurwitz

 

Photo Synesthesia

 

Remembering how she loved them,

how she stopped and marvelled

at their tracery, their canary convolutions,

a nest of tangled sunlight on the forest floor-

I send a photograph of this year’s bounty:

trout lilies in the wood, sepals lifted as in prayer.

 

She returns the gift with hellebores: dusky rose,

palest green and white, arranged inside a curve

of darkened bowl. Last week’s snow woke them,

dappled in the cool of mossy places. Such small

adagios. Spring stirs overtones, sips beginning in

a whisper of circumference. She awaits its overture:

 

my mother knows each harmony by heart.

 

March Comes In

 

The predator month arrives already

hunting. So late the hour’s early,

March rakes its claws across the sky,

rending fissures flashed and strobed.

 

As with any nature show, this soundtrack

stretches out suspense, then booms cacophony:

pouncing, it rips arteries from necks of cloud,

torrents geysers drum-rolling on the roof.

 

Dog trembles, knows something has awoken

ravenous, caught his shaking scent. March

waits outside in downpour, whisker-twitched

and crouching, ever-ready to Spring…

 

Early Spring, North Carolina

 

Soft, the door of morning

swings, unfurling silk:

narcissus, tulips, daffodils.

 

I sound out their language,

whisper tongue to petal, tunic

shed, I try to conjugate a bud.

 

My walk meanders past a stream

that’s mid-soliloquy, improvising ferns

and jessamine, small scatterings of snowdrops.

 

Here, the taste of daylight,

traced with dew. There,

the water’s undulated song.

 

To be a witness.

 

Movement

For Robert Hurwitz, musician

 

You have modulated now

into another key, a chord not

diminished or augmented

but a different mode, still undiscovered

by our human mathematics.

 

You never said that death would be a part

of larger composition, but the silence

left behind; reverberation after a conclusion,

that sense a spreading skein of light’s

diminuendo into dark.

 

Yet I find, in these gray days

which follow winter rain, I hear

as if dotted on the wind,

astringent notes of finches, defiant flutes

that perforate the clouds.

 

I can still read the notes

you left inside me: a progression

without parallel. I, your youngest

daughter, fifth in family, your almost

resolution.

 

Now the air of you nocturnes

my pulse, and so I sit here,

breath stretched and strung to bridge

across your rest. Beneath my skin, I feel you

spreading out your arms,

 

as if waiting for forever

to begin.

Alison Hurwitz has recently been published in Global Poemic, Words and Whispers, Tiferet Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Anti-Heroin Chic, Book of Matches, The Shore, Amethyst Review, Rust and Moth, Thimble Magazine, Speckled Trout Review, River Heron Review, Gyroscope Review, The Jewish Writing Project, and SWWIM Every Day. Her work is forthcoming from Minyan Magazine, RockPaperPoem, and Carmina Magazine. She lives with her family and rescue dog in North Carolina, and when not writing, officiates weddings and memorial services, hosts Well-Versed Words, a free monthly online poetry reading, takes long walks in the woods and dances in her kitchen. See more at alisonhurwitz.com