Reflected sunrise

Serpentine gold-orange chains, flickering loosely on the water’s surface 

Slip away and twinkle, gently lifting waves, bright fleeting punctuation

Not labyrinthine, like plaited vines, coiled invaders wrapped around trunks of hay-colored winter bark 

Waves touch down and stir up clouds which burst and disappear as quickly as fireworks, but silently

Like ashes poured into the sea, blurring edges

The way things look through tears

Snow to dirt, rocks to pebbles and shells, sand to water, sea to sky, sun to earth

Receding from shore are Matryoshka boot prints, each a silvery map, oblong and ever-widening where long-gone visitors crashed through crusted snowdrifts

Leaving nesting entry wounds smoothed by thaws, frozen over and over

Next to them are paw prints the size of a toddler’s outstretched hand

(No dogs in sight today, though wind mimics the way they exhale winter air in sharp bursts)

Our children traced their hands on fabric that endures and on construction paper from which bright colors have leached, brilliant red to light brick, Kelly green to weak pea soup

Their newborn footprints were stamped on hospital paper in blue ink, toes smaller than the blush blue and white-pink periwinkles clustered along the rocky shore

Their faces as they looked at their father when he could hold them in one arm, their perfect heads cupped in the hand that bore his wedding ring

My boots stay atop today’s unyielding ice coating, so my footprints are no different than yours

Which are not here

Just like that day, this day

At the beginning of Spring

When you became not here

But everywhere