I can see spring in winter.

I can see both the gray winter limbs and the limbs red with sap. I can see the sap flowing, although it is not; can see both the leafless twigs and the leaves sprouting from their twigs—the buds greening and bursting, the leaves unfurling. I can see through the snow and frozen ground to the growing roots, the burgeoning seeds. I can see it all at once, not only spring and winter but summer and fall too, the cells hardening, the leaves fading falling decaying, the frost, the thaw, the rising sap, the buds and then the leaves again, greening and failing and falling. . . .

But all at once, I can see it all at once.

Day in night, night in day. Death in life, life in death.

Fire in ice.

Like a seed, I lie here on the ground. Like a seed, I am both sleeping and awake, both living and dead. The germ is alive in me but quiet, waiting at my center. The rest of me is food to it—food, husk, shell, nothing more.

Something descends, lands on me, scratching where it touches. I open my eyes to the darkness and can both see and not see. Whatever stands there stands uneasily, quivering on its uneven perch. A tidy weightless uneasy thing. The musty smell of feathers, of fear; the clack of tongue in beak. I see bird, not a bird particularly, not a kind of bird, just bird. Bird, beak, an uneasy scrabbling on the palm of my hand.

And on my arm. Moving along the sca folding my arm makes. Coming closer to me now, to the center of me, to the germ of me. There now. Above me now.

Its beak is quick. It does not hurt, but I hear its tapping on my husk, near and sharp, tapping into my shell, tapping its way to my germ, the sweet kernel of my life, the delicious center. With barbed tongue it raises to the light what it finds there: moments small and large, acts, regrets, glimpses, fragments. Particles of knowledge: The flowers of the nasturtium, the daylily, the viola are edible. . . . A yellow-orange-purple-red salad. The boy tasting the petals one by one, lifting them to his mouth, that reluctant but voracious creature his mouth. Oh, he says. Oh. They are a little sweet, he says. And some bitter, like pepper. But I like them. And he eats.

The boy who ate flowers.

I loved him. Loved him as his mother would have, as his father should have; loved him in their stead.

And in return he gave me my life.