Woodbury, Vermont

an abundance of milk & all things are shifting                        another year’s flight

                                                                                                 Mud Season has come

            Winter has thrown down her shield & spear to wallow in the past

where she was young & made divine love in the blurred banks of forgetting,

of gentleness,

Schikoy stops       by the roadside

on her way home from delivering raw milk               to find

a hawk smothered in the mouth of mud

she leaves some tobacco burning & takes the body home for a proper burial

on the forest service road               feathers blossom

into flame & the hawk transforms into a bull in the truck bed             now,

Schikoy can burn

her stack of twenties          an Abenacki elder taught her to catch story

on the flakes of acorn that have brushed the black hairs of a fox tail,

to tan hides for ceremony that flap beside the woodshed as if to say,

                               it’s spring, of course

the slow ticking of the woodstove’s chimney pipe

the bread rising                             sea berries & the red road to new land

an abundance of milk & all things are shifting        Schikoy’s Jersey cow, Rosa,

is pregnant          by the end of next winter, she will birth a calf with pale wings

what is a field in blossom,

but a past self come to feed again, but the land itself in flight?