Tara Borin

Going Back

Weeds grown tall
in our hard-won garden.
It didn’t take long for the bush
to take over:
it storms the clearing,
an army with endless recruits.

Breath held
between timber walls,
woodsmoke and cabin ferment.

Desiccated flies line windowsills,
squirrels have filled the tea cups
with spore-dusted mushrooms,
nested in torn cushions.

Climb the ladder to the loft,
moth-bitten quilt still neat
on the mouse-burrowed mattress.

The outdoors have moved in
among our forgotten things,
skirt our hushed spectres
going through their eternal paces.

These logs echo our loving and
our leaving.
Winter without end,
sadness deep as the snow that year.

Like a tree exploding in the quiet of forty below,
shotgun start,
we fled
not bothering to lock
the front door.