Winter: A Love Poem

by Meg Weston

November

Slanted light gilds tree trunks 
in disappearing daylight
the creeping lengths of shadows
echoing in the bay.  I’ve always
been drawn to the sea—the smoke
that rises off the water when the air
grows cold, the water still warm.
The sea brought you to me.

December

Cold rain, the temperature drops 
and suddenly trees are glazed 
in ice.  Sun shimmering through a forest
and the world stays frozen 
as glittering time stops in prisms
of glass leaves.  At night the full moon
spotlights the branches.  You and I walk
out in slippers to gaze at the sky. 

January

You sit on the shore and I skate onto 
the frozen ice—a mirror with deep traces 
of white lines—a Miro painting with patches of blue 
sky on the black and white pond 
quenching my thirst for the perfect ice 
beneath the blades of my skates, 
you watch from shore as I glide past.

February

Midwinter night and we’re driving home.
Time warps when you put the high beams on,
watch the snow swirl blinding white flakes
in every direction across a black tunnel
of time unending as the road disappears
we’re lost in a blizzard of memories—
those we’ve shared about driving in the snow,
lost or afraid or alone or with another,
and those we haven’t shared: of past loves
falling in and out of love’s grasp, and why,
why now, I am feeling awe looking out 
of the grimy windshield of an SUV hurtling
along a country road, trees lurching into view,
fence posts dragging past.  We are lost in this
moment. Only this moment. With you alone.