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 plumb silence and learn. A mother, grandmother, gardener, teacher, and community activist in Madison, Wisconsin, her poetry appears on the Madison Vets for Peace website, in Amethyst Review, A Catalog of Small Machines, and the Lost Blonde 2026 Anthology. She can be found among the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.
