Landscape of the Fatherless

by Laura Ross

As kids, we built shelters from blankets
and lit the soft alcoves with a nightlight—
the kind you buy at a Caribbean market,
made of clamshells and plastic coral.
Even on rainy days, in our new house
the carpet was spring green. The seasons
swapped out in a vase on our father’s grave—
lilies, sunflowers, chrysanthemums.
Then it snowed, and we could see everything
was a landform—foreground, background,
a panorama, voluminous and disorienting.
White shards pieced between matte trunks
of trees whose empty branches filled with stars.
The new landscape—slippery, bitter, curious.
It mounded to the tops of our boots and numbed
our fingers. Wrapped in a thin sweater
and leaning out of the door, our mother worried
while we, in stoic awe, surveyed the transformation—
the heaped backyard, the white draped woodpile,
snowflakes that blew in like a clinging moss.
Bundled up for the reckoning, nothing came back
to us in echoes. Even the shadows had changed.
No longer earthbound, they had risen
in translucent blue to the surface of the snow.
We saw them everywhere—a sharp delineation
between what had fallen and what had not.