THROUGH THE GREEN SEAM

There is a moment in early April
when the light shifts its angle
just enough —
not warmer, not brighter,
just different,
the way a room feels different
when someone who has always been in it
is no longer there.

I have been standing at the field’s edge
for what feels like a whole year.

Watching the fox cross without hesitation.
Watching the crocus push through without asking.
Watching the cedar hold its shape
while everything around it negotiates.

Today I don’t stop at the edge.
The mud takes my boots
and I let it.
The wet grass soaks through
and I let it.
The cold comes up through the soles
into the ankles, the shins —
the body’s old conversation with the ground
resuming after a long silence.

The field is not beautiful.
It is bare, soft, smelling of everything
that spent the winter becoming something else.
Rot and iron and the faint sweetness
I have learned to recognize
as the smell of change
doing its slow work underground.

A bird moves through the near trees —
I catch the movement, not the creature.

Enough.

I walk into the field
where the stream unthreads itself
through the low meadow,
crouch down,
put my fingers in.

The cold is absolute.
Under it, the current —
patient, specific,
going where it has always been going
without deliberation,
without looking back.

I stay until my hand
stops trying to decide
what it feels
and simply feels it.

Then I stand.

The field receives me
the way it receives everything —
without ceremony,
without witness,
without needing the moment
to be more than it is.

I walked in.
That’s all.
That’s everything.

— Jean Kiernan Detjen