Today's poem is Dear After by Kate Kearns. It is read by Julia Bouwsma.
Dear After
The resurrection fern, down-curled
and drought-crisp,
waits dry in a grey between,
then, when water
steeps it again, revives to evergreen.
In limbo it thrives,
patient, like the wood frog
whose eggy body
freezes solid in winter, its blood
a tangled icicle.
Though heart and brain clink
like crystal and stop
their vital work, livingness,
somewhere inside,
lives. Thaws with the brook silt
and starts back up.
It goes on. Just like that. And water
fills the dirt-brown fern to green.
Dear After, I don’t know what
to ask for,
I don’t know where this
correspondence goes.
My love sleeps warm
beside me.
Someday soon or not soon,
for one of us
then the other, this query will
become an elegy.
Remind me it’s possible to feel
this this.
It’s possible for atoms to disperse
as they will,
by all evidence scattered,
while
a frond of warmth,
the long fact of it,
holds, like a body’s imprint
in its bed.