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
