Winter reveals all the broken things
you don’t see in the modest months,
the tree snapped in half, a frayed thing,
touching its forehead to the cold ground –
cracked buckets and oblong strips of tires,
outbuildings leaning perilously to one side
as though they’ve had too many beers
when really all they’ve had is too much time,
on ice, sipping endlessly in the corner
until they slouch mumbling to sleep,
the wind reaches in through the slats
and then out again across the broken things
things you can’t see in the lying summer
when the saplings stretch out and splay their leaves
into all that surplus space, showing off, really,
and the grass blades pierce the soil and sky,
and the fiddlehead ferns harmonize –
all that green hiding the muted colors, the sharp edges
the half-printed words now slurred,
the right angles now slant,
sleeping it off under enabling summer,
it isn’t right.
Why be so quick to shed the gray skies?
Hold the winter close, the space between the things
left behind, even the cold wind that brings us to tears –
beauty lies in brokenness, the way things are,
but then the earth sulkily slouches nearer to the sun
and all of the green things, all the plentiful things
unfold
to hide the want that asks for nothing.
Halfway North 