It’s a cold magic today,
like the kind I remember
during the big freeze in North Carolina
when I was a young girl
and we had more than a week off school
because they’re didn’t know what to do
with all that snow.
The ice weighed down tree branches
and it looked so beautiful
but it was dangerous too.
I remember walking outside, slowly,
like any misstep would find me falling
into another world.
I tasted the fresh snow and the ice
and knew it was something purer than me.
Today is like that.
Cold and a little dangerous.
It’s too bright to be bleak
and it feels like the ground is brittle
but it’s more solid than I am,
with my changeable moods
and wandering thoughts.
I hardly taste fresh snow now
because the world is too warm
and I am so tainted it seems a great divide
but I like to watch it cover everything
as if we can all be fresh again.

In the middle of a silent wood,
wondering at the dreams
of sleeping animals beneath the snow.
Being as still as possible
with breath being the only sound.
Once in awhile, a small chirp
and a light flutter of faraway wings.
Awe fills this ordinary day
when heavy, weary feet pause
to listen to nothing.
Even the waters have hushed
in reverence to winter’s chill.

It’s messy but should be simple.
I can’t say when it began
or why. I sort of know how.
We both know what it is.

But I don’t question some things.
That comes from experience
and finding knowing less can be better.
It allows more room for magic.

I will read you a poem I like soon
and I wonder if you’ll be able to hear
how I feel between words
that are not mine.

This is as simple as the night fractal,
when moonlight ruffles a sleepy tree
or morning sun nudges a furled fern.
And it sounds like a groaning cello.

I watch the same dance over and over
online with the music muted,
noting the exaggerated expressions,
dramatic flourishes, and lithe dancers
moving like panthers together
while I sit like a puffed pastry
with only a wisp of muscle memory
from when I danced.
I can still move and be salacious,
but there seems little call for it nowadays,
as the woman in the mirror is
fully grey and swollen,
more a cushion than a catalyst.
There is still a need to move though.

What a grey day!
If I were a painter,
I could convey the drear
in heaps of paint
(I am too heavy for watercolors
at this point in my life)
but I like to watch
so that makes me a watcher
and I write poems
so that makes me a watcher who writes,
so in too many words,
I can describe the layers of wet and grey
to convey the warm winter’s day
with maybe some of the sadness
but not the ever-bubbling sense of hope
that keeps pushing through
because I am a watcher who writes who
also looks for color
because color is linked to hope
and I am a watcher who writes and hopes
who is maybe in love and a little foolish too.