Wintergreen
A gray day in March
is the best time to go hunting
for teaberries—
bright as fresh drops of blood
under the glossy wings
of wintergreen,
sharp and sweet
after all those months
of frozen burial.
Poems on the topic: winter
Poems on the topic “winter” on Poets.by.
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.
Bark Ode
It’s only in strong sun
that the winter woods resemble
a bar-coded label.
Today is gray.
I pause to stroke the bark
of a diseased chestnut oak,
ridges kinked and folded,
ordinarily straight lines
impossible to read.
Miner
Opossum out at mid-day
on the glare ice
wipes its snout with its paws.
It’s digging through the crust
to reach food we’ve pitched—
old barbecue sauce, rotten cabbage—
inserting its head
as if through the shell
of a great white egg…
Gospel
Five below zero.
The stream bank is garlanded
with flowers of frost.
The dogmatic drone
of a single-prop plane,
its cross-shaped silhouette.
The sky is blue as a bruise.
My lungs ache
just from trying to breathe.
Nuthatch
Nuthatch at the window,
probing under the sill
for frozen bugs and pupae,
one eye on the glass
where, behind the bare trees,
my bare face swims up—
that odd ice
on a sideways pond
with its year-round winter…
January noon
In the owl’s flight
as in the conifers it left:
that silence.
It’s enormous,
the frozen carcass of a cow
eaten by chickadees.
O trees like forks,
the sky too is a dish
best served cold.
Winter Road
Asphalt
fades to white
from weeks of salt.
Ice stitches
jack-knifed feathers
in the ditch
beside
the gray ridge
the snowplow made.
Phragmites rocks
in the wake
of passing trucks.
White Christmas
Nothing is more innocent than snow.
It says: I am not of your world.
We wonder: What child is this,
what wool, what milk?
Then we look back & see our footprints
multiplying behind us.
Maybe this is nothing but a white flag.
But whose turn is it to surrender?
New snow falls & fills the footprints in.
We feel we are being measured for immaculate shoes.
Secret Santa
In dark December, sink
into the memory of childhood
like a bog man into the peat.
Drink too much & sing.
Gather all your small griefs,
your long-bearded regrets
& grotesque humiliations,
dress them in red & set
them to hammering. This is
the season of fresh starts
& the slaughter of innocents.
Remember to cut air holes
in the top crust & don’t stint
on butter. Wear sensible boots.
Go out into the long night
& learn the names of the stars.
Subnivean
Like varicose veins
in the thinning snow, the dark
tunnels of the voles.
My garbage is nothing
but coffee grounds, each morning
wrapped in its filter-shroud.
I miss summer:
those small millipedes that glide
across the bathroom floor.
Cibola 3
I awake in the dark and shake free
of sheets & blankets, of down-filled
quilt. The rituals of waking–
the long, hot shower, the coffee–give
my mind the chance to keep drifting,
let memory make what it will
of the contours of sleep.
Oddest of all are the dreams in which
one awakes, forgetting all rituals.
And it seems normal to go out naked,
for instance, in the middle of winter.
The snow’s alive, remember?
It ripples, blue flames slip
through the trees like fish.
I feel fur sprouting all along my spine.
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