Aubade

Annick MacAskill

Who’s to say when spring arrives? The crowns

of jays on the deck, a downy woodpecker who mistakes

man-made for natural habitat.

The surprise—a great heron’s flat yellow eye,

sharpened through the lens of your father’s

binoculars (hauled in a black carry-on

across provinces), its feathers navy and slate, jean-

coloured, startling against the river,

the anemic grasses—a pop quiz on

photo-receptivity

after months of white on white, the clouded absence

of spectrum.

Annick MacAskill is the author of No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), and a chapbook, Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos (Frog Hollow Press, 2016). She has new poems forthcoming in Canadian Notes & Queries, Event, The Antigonish Review, Room Magazine, and The Nova Scotia Advocate. Originally from Ontario, she currently lives and writes in Halifax.