Mom and Dad’s boots on snowy train tracks.
You walk ahead in a striped blue scarf.
Every so often I turn my mouth up to yours
To see your grin open white against the sky and snow.
I rarely close my eyes when we kiss. Why would I?
Our love leaves no trace,
Goes the poem I choose for us to sing
From the Leonard Cohen hotel-nightstand-bible book
I keep at the bedside.
This morning we sing
On the bedroom floor of the house––set on a cliff above their red-brick town
With churches too big for it. Cathedrals, really.
When we arrived in golden light,
All of the trees within a mile of the ski mountain
Were dazzling, as if it were the morning after an ice storm.
But the ground was bare: This tinsel
The snow machine’s doing.
Slowly, we made a language we would need
In this world.
So far we had only a list of definitions,
Which awaited their words.
What would you name, for instance, the agitation
Of an unseasonable February day
When the magnolias are showing their yellow faces,
And the daffodils’ stems are emerging––pubescent and shameful––and the crocuses
Are announcing their purple bloom
Though they would never have done so
In earthly childhood.
What would you name the ski mountain where snow no longer falls.
And the March which was once winter.
Last year we walked
Frigid in the wind blowing off the Housatonic.
And, each day, across Lake Mansfield,
Which had frozen solid––already an achievement.
We were on sturdy ice. Children skated at the shore.
My mother spoke to the fishermen, who hadn’t caught anything yet.
In the middle of the lake
We all stood in the sun.
On our way to the woods,
Where a Wendell Berry poem had been laminated and tacked up
At the trailhead. (Peace of Wild Things, surely,
And surely I forced you to listen to my stumbling recital.)
The trail led to a short loop, to a boulder.
The boulder unremarkable
Had you forgotten to remind me
It was left behind when a glacier retreated from this place.
I can’t remember when your body
Became a home to mine. A good place to pause for a moment,
To take a rest, and nest, and keep safe,
And begin to dream for the night.