Winter Landscape with Maple Keys
Here’s a sign of return,
of belonging we cannot attend
but for short days, a life
we cannot name except indirectly.
You might say
meadowsweet, burdock, mullein.
The delicate, hairy bracts
of cinquefoil remain the season
and nod on crisp air
at the tips of brittle stalks.
Stay with me a little longer.
Tucked into a creel of roots
at Chris Emmon’s oak,
a tawny clutch of leaves
where a wanderer over
the brisk hillside finds rest.
And when I look into maples
as you do now,
hundreds of winged seeds,
for their kind of shiver,
for their kind of clinging,
are like old words for
turning to slate gray woods,
drizzling mists, cloud comb.
The mendicant deer,
our cousins, find rest.
In a freeze the seeds will skitter
like moths, brown and hoar,
when they let go,
a tinkling like faint, small bells.
Lawrence Wray’s poems can be found in Stone Poetry Quarterly, Vox Populi, Presence, Crab Orchard Review, St. Katherine Review, and Coal Hill Review, and in the anthology The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain. Read more.