Our Winter

As a foreword:  this is the only poem I wrote in college (for class) I was ever satisfied with. Last night, while cleaning out my Google docs, I found it. I had thought it gone for good!

One of my friends was in a doctor's waiting office once, said she read this and  it made her morning.

Our Winter

Fall, bent like my father’s sword, slides into my skin on the days I’m least expecting it. Memories of warm weather, postcards from below the equator, drift aimless through my head. You stood a palm tree swayed by a hurricane’s rough and heavy breezes. But I erased your name with the pounding of the late September rain. Lake Erie winters soon pounce up from behind as masked as a mugger in the dead of night. Your hands around your own throat and you telling me to dress warm because illness is a constant visitor, a dear friend. The snow leaves us naked and stranded, motorists on the side of the highway with a flat. Flat. Winter is a conqueror of the weakest hearts and I struggled to believe. Spring? Where was it? The rain froze into snow pellets, bullets of ice enough to tear through kneecaps. To shatter cartilage. You kept your coffee warm with your hands and your lap. Winter, a withered old man with greedy fingers that run through the precious hairs on your scalp. We prayed for a slow release and his body to be deposited under the ever-building ice on the water. His smell, of decayed flesh. Roses would rise when spring sang, all too ready for confession. Where did the fall run to? When did the rain warp into snow and then back again? We are happy to bask and make light of our confusion. In fact, we act like it’s never there. The sun’s virgin rays poke you awake and we push our hopes aside. The happening is nigh but an astrologer with eyes blind cast descriptions from a darkened chamber, full of light and yet somehow devoid.