A POEM FROM SOLSTICE

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Well, it’s almost fall, which for me means it’s almost winter! I like to rush the holidays because I am a colored-light junkie.

In the collection called Solstice I published three wintery poems. This is one of them:

DRIVING HOME AFTER THE HOLIDAYS

My eyes like driving

on lonely winter roads

where, encased in shale,

topped with the scrub-like growth of evergreen farms

and the tired slump of empty apple trees,

mutsu, fuji, gala,

the road drops out from under the wheels in an alarming way,

making my breath catch,

and when the car touches down again it’s as if it is planing

skimming the road

here on watery, there on icy, glittering sheets.

When the car rises again

the red clay silos of Pennsylvania present themselves to me

a surprise bit of faded color among the five-o’clock-shadow

of the leftover stubs of crispy corn fields mowed late in fall.

As the car moves up and down

the washed out blue of the sky slips

between the soft swells of the worn-down mountains

brushing up against the ground.

My eyes roll along the road’s swells and curves

like the carefully hoarded acorn

the white-eared squirrel by the side of the road

dropped from his mouth so he could

twitch his nose disapprovingly at the rush of cold air

made by my car slipping and sliding by.

Sometimes it is almost too much to see.

The sharp wind stings my eyes,

the landscape as bare, naked, and unbending

as being beneath a man

heartbeat tuned to the radial thump,

hair streaming down behind me like wind,

face pressed into the rhythmic road

of neck curving into broad shoulder.

Want more of my poetry? Well, thank you very much! Buy the book! Solstice