THE GIFT OF WINTER

Today the alder outside my window

motionless, the forsythia

holding its breath, the last smear

of fog burnt away so the morning

can enter the long memory

of winter, clear and uncorrupted.

Twelve years old, I tramped the back alleys

searching for something I couldn’t

name or describe and found cinders

jeweled with tiny points of light

that could cut; I found handwritten,

scented letters, gifts from the future,

their words frozen in the weather—

“Paola, there’s never a right time,”

written in a straight, manly hand that collapsed

from exhaustion. There were trees there too,

a row of tattered Chinese elms

to shade the past year’s garbage,

a fenced-in copper beech thicker

than a sedan, its leafless

branches stiffening in wind.

There was always that wind, unnamed,

defiant, whistling in the face

of winter and not this odd calm

risen from nowhere outside

my window and closing in. Back then

when the year’s worst blizzards

whited out the old neighborhood,

there was always new life aching

to break through and held back

by nothing I could do to stop it.