Stepping light into the brown March bareness
into what should be white, frozen, pinching us into
longing for any other color. The landscape is so out of frame
I’m timid to declare it a great winter because
there is no grace being so far out of step into
another kind of unprecedented again.
Normal would suit fine — hat, coat, boots
not tanks and bare chested boys running the lake, sun
heating the core, a crack and pull of ice freeing
oaks along its edges, intermittent howling
wind over ice, air escaping its clinking lungs
like a warning there may not be enough.
Eyes of crocus, fingers of lilies, swelling of buds,
robin up at dawn singing its song that makes me
melancholic. Nothing seems to know it’s not time. And
maybe that nothing is me, my ache for something frozen
solid as it’s supposed to be, something to hammer
that won’t break quickly, turn too fast.
Everything is waking before its time but I hit snooze
as if postponing bad news, as if someone is about to pull a curtain,
reveal a white mirage of ourselves in a storm of falling bees.
—
Rebecca Surmont lives in Minnesota where she can fully enjoy the seasons and cycles of life that is often expressed in her work. She has a love of trains, corn fields, dogs, and tiny things. Her written work has been featured in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Eunoia Review, Common Ground Review, Crowstep Literary Journal, and Ekphrastic Review, among others. She is currently working on her first chapbook.
