The Sand Hill Review          http://www.sandhillreview.org       2001 November

 

Winter

 

The wife re-enters

her life, a country

vaguely familiar,

the lily on the pale plates,

she remembers,

the spider web above

the hearth.  She makes

smiles for the family

next door.  She considers

selling her smiles.  She made

a cloak for winter.  It's

the color of his eyes;

it holds her still as

she stands in the yard

the night the moon

is full again.  She thinks                          

it's a long florescent tube

she could walk through,

a light so bright she

would see her bones.

She sees that winter is

a graveyard. Her feet make

tick, tick on the frost

as she surveys the small graves. 

Dalias, Poppy, Phlox, rest in peace.

Tulips, Scilla, peace.  Like

fetuses, she thinks,

like beautiful girl children,

their flowery dresses

desiccated.  This is why

resurrection was invented,

she thinks.  Think

what has been said

of the moon: fingernail,

disc, cheese, blue, man in the,

face, cup, luminous, goddess,

a woman's gravity. 

Gravity, she sings, then grave.

Crave.  Craven.  Cave, she sings.

No one has called the moon a cave.                  

Cave.  The moon is the cave

of the body.  She turns,

her velvet boots walk her

to the door.  Tick, tick.  She

should remember her gloves. 

Entering, she glances back

briefly as she mounts

the stairs, finding the moon

in the center of her

high kitchen window.

Lover, she thinks, cold, far

away, florescent.

Her only one.

 

JCWatson