“A Perhaps Hand”

Spring is a slap to the senses — go out, be happy, live! — now that the light stays longer there is cause for wide-open eyes and heart that billows out to any body of water. The tree that you have been watching all fall, all winter, in the school lot, giving out on hope that its perfectly formed branches will awaken with lime-green murmurings — yet it happened overnight, pushed out buds like tiny babies no one ever cared about, in a small rural town in Delaware — I pretend to possess the stealth of waiting, wistful-faced treading slowly on asphalt, on my way to the car.