One Poem

Winter Cold


It’s not that horrible after sex
conversation when we rationally agree
to get on with our pedantic,
insufferable, ridiculous lives or your boots
clamoring down the steps, the phone
not answered, or the letters written

in a moment to reveal our failure:
how we don’t notice a dandelion
once yellow dormant under snow,
or those birds, those tiny brown
smudges that do not
go South for winter. It’s Elizabeth

at a phone booth calling my mother
for some cash and a cab to a motel
where she will sit within four walls
on the edge of a bed hugging
a poodle. Then Beatrice
not willing to talk. Her sadness sunk

deep into plush wall-to-wall carpeting.
And again those walls, those white
walls that surround your father,
or is it my father, all of us
who need so much more. It’s justified
this feeling of pure terror.

One more time quiet falls white
on an asphalt road, on the hood of cars,
on the path toward my front door.


Note: I found this poem on my harddrive. I wrote it a long time ago in Michigan. It must have been February or March. It was snowing. It was cold.