Wintering


Tell me
I am a garden, the odd path

out of the forest, thorns. The floor
of our stone house

loves you
as I love your morning

weight, evening lightness.
We harvest the mist

over four lakes. We envy
beech leaves,

which won’t escape their branch
and fall.

It is January. You dive
for lake pearls,

freshwater assassins. What
would you have me

tell you? The black socks
were a joke. The cork

dried out. The air
still wet after rain. We hide

the shoe in our sycamore
and feast

on solitude. We envy mallards
traipsing

the lake’s thin ice.
Last ice. You

unstitch
your shirt, my sheet,

this poem.
At midnight, we thirst,

we wake and pace the halls.
Rose glass, ache,

pewter, moss: I fail
the window’s art. You wait

out the frost. Tell me
how to undo you.

- Jennifer Chang (from Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction)

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