On the Equinox

Now Old Man Winter shakes his purse
And frowns at his barren accounts;
His manor crumbles with each curse:
How did he squander such amounts?

He thunders through the empty hall,
Opens the vault of hail and gust--
His savings--but he's spent them all;
Where once was sleet, now all is dust.

Now Spring steps cautious down the street
And shines each penny like it's gold;
She smiles at the sun's new heat
Because she remembers the cold.

Then Love creeps in, a child of Spring:
All pink, and pale, and tiptoeing.




photograph by Mikey Baratta

The Grasshopper in Winter

The grasshopper on the ground is dead--
not by boot, or hooting bird,
or by sultry spider--
but dead
as the grass, passed away,
and the hop that ceased.

His armor is accounted for,
though curled in the afterlife
into some aquatic thing.
The hop is gone,
but perhaps in that small beyond,
he swims.




art: "The Warrior in Winter," by Julia Jeffrey

Interlude: Other People's Poetry

Starlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,

but with stars in their black feathers,

they spring from the telephone wire

and instantly


they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.

And now, in the theater of air,

they swing over buildings,


dipping and rising;

they float like one stippled star

that opens,

becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;

and you watch
and you try

but you simply can't imagine

how they do it

with no articulated instruction, no pause,

only the silent confirmation

that they are this notable thing,


this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin

over and over again,

full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,


even in the leafless winter,

even in the ashy city.

I am thinking now

of grief, and of getting past it;



I feel my boots

trying to leave the ground,

I feel my heart

pumping hard, I want



to think again of dangerous and noble things.

I want to be light and frolicsome.

I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,

as though I had wings.




-Mary Oliver

photograph by Jipps

My Mother Encounters Celebrities and I Misunderstand

I.

One winter before I was born
my mother stepped into an elevator.
The silent brass doors slid
together too quickly and she toppled,
landing face-first

in Baryshnikov's striped mink coat.
She told me this when I was six
and leaping, a blizzard of tulle
and breathlessness around
her rocking chair. As I remember it,

I say now, He was rude to you.
Did Baryshnikov really push you?


Short, she says, looking over
the Sunday Style section. I didn't say rude.
I said short.




photograph by Chuck Domitrovich

Anna in the Brambles

She had hidden the dark, oily seeds,
buried them deep in the dry side of the garden.
Winter saw rock-hard ground, silence between rooms,
white skies. And then spring, and with the rise
of string beans, peppers, foxglove,
the garden gave an army
of thorny, hungry spines.
She was uprooting them, swearing, bleeding,
when I found her in the dirt.




photograph by wordsforsnow

Trespass at the Reservoir

On frozen shores the
only sound was you, punching
holes in cracking ice.

After a Long Winter

There are trees near your house
that you did not know were cherry
until the blossoms came.









photograph by Toshihiro Oshima

Written on the Front Lawn

Each night since you left
the view's been the same:
a blue, empty barn,
the light I left on,
the pushpin of Venus
not budging overhead.





photograph by Rachel K

Three Days In

Nothing is longer
than these twenty-eight days, not
waiting rooms, not pregnancy tests,
not the moment when the brakes
will not save you. In four weeks
I will die, find my own grave,
pull the earth blanket over
my grateful eyes. In four weeks
I will be born, white-hot
from the belly of a meteor,
shooting feathers and sparks,
burning every bridge I come to.




photograph by flickr user Johnson Cameraface

Shouted from the Office Window

I see the snow
melting, Spring, don't pretend
you're not out there.





photograph by flickr user Todd (cedarkayak)

After the Inauguration

The office is snow-fall silent.
As I pass rows of desks, fingers
are gentler on the keys, tissues meet
the corners of quickly drying eyes.
No one speaks. A girl puts
her sandwich into the toaster oven,
closing the little door
as though a baby slept inside.

On screen the crowd dispersed
in easy, graceful rows, breaking off
like plates of ice above a thawing stream.



Photograph by Susan Walsh - AP

Morning Commute After the Ice Storm

At each tree's base, a carpet
of smashed ice, green in the young light
like broken Coke bottles. Concentric
circles around the trunk lead away
like melting waves, the shards
of crystal tinkling beneath each
creaking branch. There are
no trees in the graveyard, only
the wilted wreaths propped
against one illegible slab.




photograph by Tori Steffen

Half Haiku: Icy Morning

You have gone; like the
vagrant moon I am homesick.






photograph by Elfi Kaut

A Connecticut Christmas

They are graduates all
of the Saint Michael's choirs,
these Cooks and Waterhouses
and Smiths. The carols
swing fast from timid waking -
a musical slumber
these twelve thick months - to Baroque
descants, four-part harmony.
Behind a man I have just met
I am propped on the bathroom door.

This is the year's one day
the glossy piano knows contact.
Dessert has been laid
on the gleaming buffet,
but the choir soldiers on.
Once in a while a neighbor
mouths, "Come, sing," to me
from a rosy couch. "Come, sing."
The voices are careless, sincere.

Weary husbands rock
on the balls of their feet, arms full
of fur coats. Their wives are full too.
The first glass to remember,
the second pretending, the third
to soak up the mess of the others.
I have climbed the stairs
for my notebook. Down in the library
a young tenor has won
the piano bench. The notes

float up, not Christmas at all,
but Journey. The tenor downstairs
looks for me and my flushed cheeks
at the borders,
and I am not there.



photograph by the indomitable Rachel K

Two Steps

Two steps led
in a fast-erasing path
from the snowy car parked
in front of mine.

The night quiet fell
in soft molecules
as I tried to guess (
with creaking boots
) where the other shoes
had gone.



photograph by flickr user khazeth

Catching Up with An Ex Over Coffee

Tell me, he says, about one time
you've been drunk. He doesn't say,
I dare you. He doesn't say, don't lie.
He doesn't say, how much do you think
you've really changed? I set my jaw
against the blows. In Brooklyn, once,
I say. My TA's apartment.
Across the too-small table I know
the gears are turning.
I don't say, After you, of course.
I say that it was February. Post-
theatre, back through the carving night
to his cold rooms. I say he showed me
cyanotypes, the skeletons of flowers,
pictures from Poland I'd already seen.
I say he brought out pepper vodka, that
his lanky frame had got a taste for it, but I,
tiny I, sputtered as his roommate laughed.
I tell how the dim bathroom
was slanted when I got there, how
the cold water sizzled on my flushed cheeks.
I do not say, I would have slept on the floor
but he did not have blankets enough. I do not say,
The next morning he talked to me
like a stranger. I say
he left me in Central Park,
an angel in the snow, beneath the 6am silence
of Jeanne-Claude and Christo's spectacle.
I say it was just breathtaking.



pinhole photograph by Tom Karlo

Through Windows, Early Darkness

The train crawls toward the city.
Nothing has ever been maddening slow
as this swerving car, yet the toy houses smear
like a jellied lens. Each lighted window
demands my intrusion. On the top floor
of a building like the one
where you used to live, a young woman sits
at the table, jars of spices spread before her
like chess pieces. Her dark hair
sweeps the dried-basil bishops. Her tears drop
on the tablecloth. The train
lurches on, passes over an unlit road
where just one car is traveling.



image by flickr user magnasoma

Waiting, Grand Central Ceiling

Aries, clamber from the sky.
My cold soil aches to break with
A stamp of your hoof, a toss
Of your horns. Frost is strong; your
Star-fur thicker. Dig until
The hole can hold you, love: rest
In the nest of my body.




photograph by Arvin Rolly Antipolo

Toward the Bus Shelter

You walked fast across the empty courtyard,
and I followed brisk behind. It would have looked
like I was chasing you. The tails of the scarf I bought you
were trapped beneath your backpack straps,
and you stopped to unstrangle yourself.

The lavender sky was cloudless, or all clouds.
My eyes streamed with the wind.





photograph by Alisa Resnik

Leap Year

I awake to whinnies and snorts.
Out past the back fence my neighbor’s horses
Are restless, have been
For four weeks.
“This time of year,” he tells me, leaning against
the peeling stable wall in dirty blue jeans,
“Mist gets into their brains,
they forget they belong here.”
I watch the mares watching me
Through the paddock gate, wondering
If I brought apples. They flick their ears
As the chestnut prince paces past, his laps
Shortening, his gait urgent.

The phone rings. “It’s the stallions,”
Says my cousin in Montana.
Upstairs I hear my husband swearing
At a stuck dresser drawer.
“Magnet even nipped at Janie
after school last week.”
I hang up, stirring sugar into my coffee,
The sound of hoofbeats in my ears.
My husband is slamming doors,
Stomping. I hear a long sigh
And open the door to let in a draft
Of damp air.



Polaroid by ChaosBang