by Jennie Meyer

your own name for Bray Street, since from the road

it sounds like engines revving behind you which never

come, just the moans from the tips of white pines

as the wind whistles through their green strands.

You walk it this week, listen each day to a new song

from the next migratory bird to land—phoebe,

swallow, towhee, soon oriole with its sweet-orange call,

the last to come, first to go. Your dog Leo ambles on,

aiming his mark on secret scents of what must belong

to fisher cat, coywolf, river otter as you approach the stream,

brash beaver musk as you pass the pond. The wind

blows milky-pink magnolia petals across the old

farmhouse lawn, anticipates the fertile rites of Beltane,

as the final bitter blasts of winter’s fingernails scratch

a street-skitter of last fall’s shriveled oak leaves. You

haven’t written this way in years—you talk as you walk,

record into your phone how the sun combs the snowy egret’s

wing. You thought that project done. But just as gnawed

and toppled birch trunks buttress beaver dams to form a pond

and farmyard stonewalls swamp to pollywog home,

this work is never done, and a fool it is who sits inside

thinking so, when voice can be blown into a flurry

with foot-pounds on pavement, flaps of pine wings,

and hawk-whines that scrape the sky. You thought you didn’t

need to be undone again, yet you unspooled

all winter inside the still of four walls.

Grief, come, let go into a million wild calls!

Jennie Meyer is a 2024 finalist for Cathexis Northwest Press: Unpublished Author Chapbook contest, a 2023 winner of a Beyond Words Creative Writing Challenge, and a 2022 Discover Gloucester grant recipient. Her poems appear in Albatross, Canary, Sheila-Na-Gig, Fourth River: Tributaries, and elsewhere. She lives on Cape Ann, MA.