The Snow Fountain (The Weeping Cherry) by Carey Salerno

It was kind of like a peripheral haunting when the snow fountain started to bloom– so many little ghosts popping up just beyond the front picture window, blossoms heavy with frost. 

Planted in the shade, the cherry had to get on with its flowers at some point. And the neighbor’s magnolia, too, starting to bud, soon will be shitting flowers all over her car. I kid you 

not is what she said to me when I told her I wanted one for myself, I guess if you’re into that kind of thing, she muttered slamming the screen door as she went inside for more margarita. 

We’re not really friends. And inside me too, the rusty bells at the edge of my hip are clanging together, waking us with their obnoxious blaring in the middle of the night, calling me to the 

window, as if I’m late to church, to see what the little apparitions of a sobbing tree are doing now, to breathe into the space like the ayurvedic masseuse taught me, pressing her palms in 

rhythmic circles over my abdomen and in times like this I really wish that she wasn’t so full of shit, that something actually halted hard metal on its pendulous track, the blossoms from 

falling on mid-size SUVs. In the night’s long shadow, everyone else in the house sleeps deeply, even my dogs. They don’t stir when I rustle out of the sheets, not even a knowing 

look, and who can say I’m not just another ghost out of time, full to the brim with buds who are thirsty to be flowers? Maybe the mechanic across the street, up with his new 

shepherd, who is also gazing out his front window trying to catch the furthest point afield on which to focus, employing any proffered methodology at all to subdue the desire, its lures 

dangling their very front of sleep, little white dreams panting against your neck, understands. I’m not alone even when I’m alone. And I don’t think the weeping cherry’s snow fountain is 

billowingly glacial but rather is likewise powerless, too, to fantasize its own fantasy, cascading in a place it’s said to be between joy and sadness, a bell’s clapper frozen to its gaping mouth. 

Certainly, its name is a tongueful and that must get so tiring along with how it roots bore relentlessly, clawing closer to the organ meat of our house. How long can this go on? 

Still, before they rust, the cherry’s flowers are so briefly immaculate, the tender pink of the very inside of them, blushing where they take hold of the branches that hang like ready 

switches, leaving me glamoured, while the ovary stirs in its old bird’s nest. If they were awake, my dogs would remind me nothing can ferry us back to the same field we left in our 

dream, a reminder I could use when concentrating on the nevercherries while the next spell of pain runs its course, the purity of pink bronzes on the old sheets of every petal, 

and further afield forsythia glow like thousandfold apparitions against the persistent dark and the man across the road is returned beneath his comforter blessedly, pup curled at his 

feet; they’re nodding off, the havoc of the neighbor’s magnolia only beginning to unfold.

Carey Salerno is the author of Tributary (2021) and Shelter (2009). She serves as executive director & executive editor of Alice James Books. Her work-in-progress is a new book of poems and a book about interpreting the structure of poetry books. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Los Angeles Review, and are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review and North American Review.

5 February 2024