The Lenten rose returns, a ghostly bloom. Crows look down upon its pink and white from the witch hazel and the maple bough, a droopy, poisonous, outmoded blossom that thrives in shade beneath my window, no more native to this soil than I am. Spawned in Greece, it came by way of the Caucasus and some Russian garden, a seed pouch in a dreaming exile’s burden.

I was born and raised four hundred miles away, cradled near brackish streams and tidal brooks. The still ponds and lakes here trouble me, accustomed as I am to the pulse of floods, the sea’s death-defying fight with gravity. The rivers here are not sea-driven or moon-mad like the Potomac, near whose restless bed my mother nursed me, or the treacherous Nanticoke that drowned so many sailors and fishermen.

How have I come to live on a wooded hill among invisible rivers so far from the sea? I feel whirled out upon my axis under this sky-high sky, unearthly blue, a top set spinning between thumb and finger to try a gambler’s luck, an old teetotum marked each side with symbols meant to tell who shall win half, or nothing, or take all; or a boy turned around to grope at blind man’s buff.

I always knew East and West and my true North by day and night, in blizzards, in and out of love: my pilot always pointed to the shore. Now vertigo is partner in the game, the rules we played by don’t count anymore. I don’t fear the future, heaven or hell, should I be called upon to find my way. I guess this is where I must prepare for death which knows no man’s compass. Time will tell.