Spring Cycles

Daylight lengthens at last,

And, nightly, the wrench and crash

Of plates of ice resumes in the brook.

Those ice sheets shatter and shift;

Cold rivulets gurgle: The drift

Of small streams riverward,

Rivers, seaward, all water hereabouts

Traveling east and south.

The Penobscot opens its mouth

At Searsport, there where the tankers

Haul in the liquid from underground.

Here, kerosene brightens the noisy night,

And there, the snow that fell into

Gordon Brook

Washes in waves against steel hulls.

David Wells Brainerd lives deep in the woods of Howland. His chapbooks of verse include “A Turn of the Wheel,” published in 2003, and “Under the Gold Sun,” published last year.