By Jana-Lee Germaine

Hard to pick the moment—first smudge
of my smile when my nephew, learning the
Earth’s age, told his teacher Grandpa’s old
as dirt! so serious, so proud to connect
eons with epochs with his own long span. 

No antidote for grief, Just walk
straight through, mom always
said, don’t stop to smell the
self-pity. My heart pushing its
wheelbarrow dirt and rocks
across the overgrown lawn, 

Sisyphus New England–style, until
one morning I flip through the
comic-a-day calendar and laugh,
though months and months too late. 

Hard to pick where—to untangle one katydid note
from the rest in September, synchronous scrumming
legs like insect Rockettes. Easier to say it was that
first leaf in autumn to orange: unexpected flash
among reams of still- 

green, precocious student of temperature
shifts you can’t unsee, can’t unfocus on once
your eye lights it, signal flare that means not
help anymore, but a spot to mark, here. The
end of something approaches, 

I learn first to drop, allot each piece to
patchwork air, branches lift, shuck down to 
simplest selves so you can see them stretch,
lengthen, then second: to stand, 

in an attitude suggesting peace, not understood by
the ever-grinding mind, but held in the core,
learning still, learning know that I am, in a far
country, meditate on the merits of snow.

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Jana-Lee Germaine is Senior Poetry Reader for Ploughshares and Social Media Marketing Manager for Presence. Her poems appear in Poet Lore, NELLE, Iron Horse, Nimrod, and elsewhere. She’s a recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation Don Kissel Emerging Artist Award for Literature and the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She earned an MFA from Emerson College. janaleegermaine.com