This tiny hunched woman pulling into the spot facing
me—her stunning white hair, arthritic hands clawing
the wheel—both is and is not my mother’s dear friend
Bonnie, who admonished as I pulled bee balm from
her flower beds, leaving clumps here and there, Yank
it all! It’ll come back. In a rush fifty years later, it does,
it comes back, here in the garden center parking lot,
light rain spangling the windshield, a blue heron
muscling its remarkable engine through the gray sky
toward the river, the same bird that fished our pond
where I would row the blue boat out to the middle
just to be alone. I’d round a corner and the heron
would unclamp and vault from a half-sunken branch,
glide beyond the next clump of trees. Sullen old man,
I thought. And: stay. I’m here to look, to touch more
things I can’t afford, to dream of having space to care
for them all.

—–

Ron Mohring is the indefatigable force behind Seven Kitchens Press. His first book, Survivable World, won the Washington Prize; a new manuscript, The Boy Who Reads in the Trees, is slowly coming together. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his scandalously young husband.