Barbara A. Taylor

Time Zone

uncanny still
this same spot
where I wept

I have returned to the old stone farmhouse of my early childhood. Here, lonely days were spent chasing feral rabbits through birch woods, checking for fresh tracks of foxes, or creeping above a badger's den, catching time in the rustling leaves. Often, I have vivid dreams: I'm picking bunches of bright buttercups in knee-high meadows, surrounded by cud-chewing Friesians, their wobbly newborns sucking on swollen udders. Next, I'm pinned between rough spiked branches in a tall thicket of trees. Indeed, these spinous woods were scary, on days of swaying shadows, when every creak and crackle meant beware those claws above your head, as the banshees wheezed through skeletal trees or roared liked the drones of the war. Yet daily, in silence, I'd tarry right here at this rusted barbed-wire fence, my mother's secret exit place, just as it was back then.

clinging ivy…
only in sepia
do I find her