What is the season of mud or slush or flood?
And what is a chill season—this season—
the one my bones ache in
the one my neck shivers with wind in
the fat season that hugs the snow
even as days linger longer, the season
that dangles shadows, that crosses boundaries
from ice to slush fluidly, that returns
where a single skunk cabbage, rooted in a bed of oak leaves
soaked in the melt shoots to the sky its first red bloom,
this chill season that fools the snow
to thinking it can resist ephemeralness,
this season whose untrodden trail
begs me to follow?
—
Carla Schwartz’s poems appear in The Practicing Poet and her collections Signs of Marriage, Mother, One More Thing, and Intimacy with the Wind. Learn more: carlapoet.com, or all social media @cb99videos. Recent/upcoming curations: Great Weather for MEDIA, Contemporary Haibun Online, Modern Haiku, Paterson Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, One Art, Rattle Magazine, Sheila-Na-Gig, Spank the Carp, The MacGuffin, and Leon Literary Review. Carla Schwartz received the NEPC Cummings Prize.
