Window and chair

Maples

They might spread
Like droplets
After we’ve gone
With our children broken

like pieces of chalk, their colors
Bled with scraped knees
Empty folding chairs
Where old uncles stared

beneath the sidewalk
The footsteps of
Sisters holding children
Like crisp colored gifts

Mufflers and muffs, clouds
of heat and frost.

With no children,
No suckled parents, no
Old friends, the wild maples
will snake

through angry old lilacs we
crouched toward each spring
And through the black tardrive.
Their roots will tunnel

Our collapsed home
The waiting black birds

A sense of us breathing
Oceans of golden saplings

Lifting forward, upward, beyond
to restore the Earth her forest.