In the Absence of Clocks

Revolution

41 Revolution Palm Sunday, pussy willow. Through the trolley’s window I watch the flower girls sell. Men and women hold stems. The downy unborn flowers are snowstorms in miniature. Why the willow? I ask. The mountains sharpen their snowy chisels against the sky. A carriage horse, blazed white, stamps through a pine-lit park. Because palms do not grow this far north. By Easter, the trolley-stops fill again. Now, the girls wave icons, cry Poppies, Carnations. As a boy, I was taught only of the famously changed: seventeen-year cicadas, St. George’s salamander, the medusas, and polyps of jellyfish. I didn’t know that the palm becomes the willow, this far north. ...