Over White Avens
by Susan Mary Freiss
Push aside the curtain, roughly woven, the color of bone.
Let the summer take your holy ambitions and smooth them out.
Walk through the gate, rotting, but still holding. Your thoughts
chirping and chitting between flutters, a chorus of association.
The ripples on the pond pixilate the trees’ reflection
gently warp the mirror world, which is, in breezeless places
more perfect and inviting than the world above
like the woods when you peer in at the beginning of the path.
A red eyed vireo, frantic and frenetic, sings incessantly.
The bird that falls from the tree like a leaf, flies up and on
over white avens at the woods edge. Admit your hunger
for loneliness, enter, savor the softening it brings.
Susan Mary Freiss writes poetry to clothe the sound within vibrant silence and to hear what she might discover. She is a mother, grandmother, gardener, teacher, and community activist in Madison, Wisconsin. Her poem “Below and Beyond War” can be found on the Madison Vets for Peace website. A member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, she has published in Amethyst Review, A Catalog of Small Machines, and the upcoming 2026 Lost Blonde Anthology.
