In this illusion of silence, I invite the parables that wintered underground

and inside the hecatoncheiral fingers of maples, of alders and oaks—these

resurrectionist totems so often dove to my resurfacing—I call

and savor the prelude to wisdom that is this nothing. Call being lost a lack

able to be curled full. To be fronded warm. To be spoken homeward with

a voice like the promise of leaves haunting someday-psithurisms into still-

naked boughs. And having come this far, I know now how hope is no

dissimilar possession. The will behind the will to hold this silence its own

kind of forum. Where both what is and what isn’t yet can coexist,

asphyxiant truths though they be. The barren now; the verdant

whenever. I tell the quiet I just want to see the thing that was sown

bear its fruit. Taste something other than this Westerosi winter and the

years it has passed beneath my palate. The ghost allotted to my ribcage

tells the quiet of impatience, how beholding the whole of time from

inside its drought-blanched belly is reminiscent of starlight. The tragedy

of exuding your name only for it to take longer than your lifetime

to be seen. A useless fruition, I punctuate into the midmorning

sprawling like a watercolor across my confession. A conclusion

to which the thing—simultaneously weight and wonder, simultaneously

the parable and the grief to read it—does not resonate. Misinterpreted

plume of smoke that it is. Untaxonomied fruit. And as I chew what

newfound seeds this exchange is exhuming from all I allowed, and denied,

that moniker, springsnow is again putting the lie to both

the forever of winter and the never of something vernal bursting

from where it despaired. Outside, dogwood-white and billowing,

the day is gorging itself on blossoms bloomed unbeknownst. The response

is not lost on me.

Rodney Wilder (he/him) is a biracially-Black nerd with work appearing in places like Half Mystic, Driftwood Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Wrongdoing Magazine, and FreezeRay Poetry, as well as Stiltzkin’s Quill, his most recent attempt at grimoiring all the geeky incense left lit in his ribcage. When not forest-bathing beneath the nearest cluster of Oregonian old-growth, he likes haikuing horror movies and getting annihilated by his wife at Tetris. Find him on Instagram at @thebardofhousewilder.