Each time I go out,
I interrupt something: a hawk’s meal,
a groundhog’s courtship.
I make an offering
of my gray hair—a fine
nesting material—
toss the cuttings out
onto the snow. The warm wind
blows them right back.
Slush
Slush: the mellifluous sound
the tires make
just before they start spinning.
Soft snow banks
are treacherous as Loreleis,
pulling the unwary driver in.
I steer gingerly with windows down,
listening to the welcome hiss
of leaves and mud.
Evergreens
Melting snow reveals
the catacombs of rodents.
It’s been a long winter.
Starving deer strip
rhododendrons of their tough,
cold-curled tongues.
Hundred-year-old hemlocks
lose their needles to an insect
thinner than a thread.
Threnody
A cop with a backpack sprayer
poisoning an urban garden—
why should I dream of this?
I carry out a dead houseplant,
but can’t find a snow-free spot
to lay it to rest.
The house finch whose eye disease
prevents him from migrating
warbles on and on.
Grand jeté
Small birds fly up
into the bare branches
of the walnut trees.
The phone rings.
Someone we know has had
another breakdown.
At the sound of my voice,
six deer delicate as ballerinas
raise their tails to leap.
Vessels
The perfect pits
in the snow around
the lowbush blueberry stems
awaken in me
the old urge to collect—a museum
of pots and bronzes,
and in the plaza,
a fountain that accommodates
every coin-sized absence…
Winter gardener
I was land-hungry in my youth.
In the summer I turned soil
and in winter hoped for snow—
a Platonic kind of field,
rich in solitude as any desert
and as free of weeds,
the leafless rose in the yard
alone with its snarl
of barbed canes.
Downsizing
Day by day
the shadows are dwindling,
assuming more realistic shapes,
like the ambitions of a man
in middle age.
The snow hardens underfoot.
I hear the first
mourning dove call of the year:
desire in a minor key.
March
A four-pronged twig tumbled by wind
has left the oddest tracks
in the snow, no two alike.
The fox, by contrast,
has walked more than a mile
in her own, earlier footprints,
leaving a single set
of blurred tracks with toes
pointing in both directions.
Winterkill
When it died, the porcupine
leaked its fluids onto the snow
like a junker car.
I turn it over
with a stick: no sign
of a wound.
Startled up from the forest floor,
sixteen doves go whistling
into the snow squall.