Everything ends.
You will end. As will I.
This winter, these frozen cobwebs of memory like so many
rivulets of ice will
melt into spring lakes
My smooth hands will gnarl like roots of old trees,
and you won’t recognize them anymore.
One day, seeing a stranger,
you’ll run from me when i ask you to dance,
and your frantic footbeats will fade away,
leaving an empathetic silence.
glitter heel club, long legs, glossed pouts landing like butter-
flies, party to party to party,
bobbed hair waving, mascara smudging, dancing drinks a haze,
glitter heels in hand, barefoot sidewalk home,
we sleep in glitter dresses dreaming, oh how twenty years ago, instead
ancient moms we’d be in dull shoes, flat.
I am a bird feeder. Come,
Nibble, Peck your fill.
Boorish beaks spill my
feed. Insistent birds
devour then shove off.
Swing me, cold wind, I’m
empty air, feathers lost.
Soft bed of snow in a dark forest, two bodies breathe.
Inhale –
we feel the cold burden, the dead weight,
it presses for answers as our chests fight to rise, rise, rise …
Exhale–
gratefully, audibly. When it’s over, snow settles
on our eyelids with the lightest touch. We, in ancient silence,
lay breathless.
Loved this poem from Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry column. It’s been a hard winter – let poetry warm your soul 🙂
American Life in Poetry: Column 462
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
This year’s brutal winter surely calls for a poem such as today’s selection, a peek at the inner workings of spring. Susan Kelly-DeWitt lives and teaches in Sacramento.
Apple Blossoms
One evening in winter
when nothing has been enough,
when the days are too short,
the nights too long
and cheerless, the secret
and docile buds of the apple
blossoms begin their quick
ascent to light. Night
after interminable night
the sugars pucker and swell
into green slips, green
silks. And just as you find
yourself at the end
of winter’s long, cold
rope, the blossoms open
like pink thimbles
and that black dollop
of shine called
bumblebee stumbles in.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2001 by Susan Kelly-DeWitt, whose most recent book of poems is The Fortunate Islands, Marick Press, 2008. Poem reprinted from To a Small Moth, Poet’s Corner Press, 2001, by permission of Susan Kelly-DeWitt and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
I never thought of you.
I never imagined it. And I always thought you could create a life
Like you construct yourself,
In the dark, with your hands in the air of a dream.
But no. When it snows and is silent, bones are ancient with
truth like skies so cold all of us reaching our hands up in the dark
shudder in realization:
creation is not a quiet stuttering dance.
It is our stars bent on self-destruction, it is anything but a dream.
Some poems to enjoy on a cold Saturday with a fine cup of coffee ….
you say in Chicago (never trust a jazz man)
clock takes a turn with me about the room,
we are shadows, and lights that flicker and dance from passing cars
drive us slowly mad with desire –
clock and I waltz about the room
tracking light movements
with precision of hunters until, suddenly, each is swallowed
whole by us in the darkness –
clock and I laugh, spinning, the world
outside growing older, each star following the same path set,
a quick flicker before our dark tongues close in with a smirk.
Waiting. Winter concise in tongue says,
“It will never happen. It can’t.”
Black birds chatty squeal
“She’s forgotten, she’s forgotten you” like
playground children in keep-away.
Wood floorboards beneath my spine reason
“Be content in memory, it is enough.”
I listen, and I wait.
Only the snowy owl, rare in visits, winks
“One day, one day. You’ll see.”
how quickly childhood hours wash ashore and recede.
we, left behind, are simple whispers of salt and foam.
in dreams, we jump waves gleeful, until time, a gentle hand,
closes our eyes for a nap, our breathing steady, slow.
Poetry by JC Snyder 