Winter Walk

Boots squishing through the snow,
Damp pine scent pressing in.
I slog through the powder
My too-big boots flopping
This way and that

Avoiding the headlights of cars,
Careful not to startle drivers
With a puffy-coated figure
On the side of the road.

On this dark, newly wintered night,
Protected from the wind
In the silent alcove of a hill
Tracing the seam of plateau and rise.

And like a cathedral, this architecture
With its strange healing power
Remakes me.  A lightened outlook
Stirs in the soul.

And like this lightness,
Just as this mystery of liquid turned solid
I too turn and condense, coalesce
Into an intricately patterned geometry 
Made possible by the starkness of the winter cold
And its depth and length

And nature's precipitation
Of liquid to solid
May be happening in me
As I, renewed in this
Forced phase-change
By the pressure of the atmosphere
From a labile puddle
To a soft white drift
Of beauty, coating the landscape
Hiding the late autumn scars
Of lack and decay.

We, Residents.

We, Residents, We
We lives our lives in snatches

A stolen three minutes
In the front parking lot
With a husband, who is dropping off the car.

A quick picnic dinner with two
Young girls
Who miss their dad.
Working all night, at hospital.

We send silly, serious, sad, angry
Texts
To one another
And flirt with last Friday night's date
Between presentations
with our iPhones

Finding some way to slip off
Unnoticed
For those bi-weekly treatment sessions
Hoping no one finds out that we,
We too, are Patients.

We get grumpy.
Sometimes grumpier than the patients,
And forget there is a sun.
Till we neglect our work for ten minutes
To see the "outside" world
The dying light against the trees.

So it goes on,
Till we're done
With these, the harried years
And, so they say, step on
To bigger, brighter things.

Love's Labors

All my life
And I could not stop
All my life passed by
And I could not stop, but loving you

Time, it seems
Abandoned me.
Or perhaps, in his wiles,
Left this indelible mark

So much as a name written across me
With each look in the mirror
I see you, or perhaps, my other.
And wonder who is this ebullient girl, this present woman
With her world so wonderfully constructed
Every detail bent to her every whim
Lacking in one essential thing- Love.
The greatest of "these"

This, Love, survived two marriages
Yours and mine,
And the birth of a child
And, as we were, two more who are lost.

This, Love, cast
like a tightly-woven net over my heart
When I thought I had taken myself back
Expecting to make the famous catch
Of self-expression.
Intending to be
A sheltering tower
A delicate bud into bloom
A greening summer field for pasture.

Instead, I am a brilliant flash
The fire-strewn sky I had always hoped for
But, after comes, no more light
Instead a pile of ash
A lazy, mocking dissipation
For in the end it is me here, Alone.
And you alone as well.

And found, standing here
Heart in hand
Only to find it is exactly, perfectly
One half.
The opposite of the fullness it never fully knew.
Instead, this dys-symmetry which I know more equally,
More than I will know myself
Seeing as I am, as it was, ever half-empty.