Tuesday poem #400 : Jaime Forsythe : Poem for Winter

Ice breaks off a pink house, daggers a snowbank.
A light clicks on at my arrival and white

turns to blue. Winter, you swear

you know me from somewhere.

You block the exit, won’t let it go,

 

so I begin a half-hearted inventory

of places I’ve been I didn’t want to

expose. My sinuses fill

 

with slush, and you and your dark

jokes, unseasonal thaw with a sub-zero

punchline, pierce with what I’ve done

 

and what’s looming. Winter, I come close

to caving some days. Incognito in wool,

I cross an echoing lake, euphoric

 

at the way it carries me, even

as my fingers ache, lower lip

fat with canker sores. Chickadees

 

lift from arrowed tracks

into a sky scraped clean. You say

a fox lit up the shoreline

 

when I wasn’t looking, that what I need

is a nap, a drink, a shinier

attitude. I wince as you bead

 

my collar, and like I said, winter,

I’m tired. The lake a scratched mirror

I can’t take my eyes from. Then a bright

 

room without curtains,

radiators holding their breath.

If showing myself to you

 

is the only way you’ll leave me,

winter, you win.

Jaime Forsythe is the author of two collections of poetry, I Heard Something (Anvil Press, 2018) and Sympathy Loophole (Mansfield Press, 2012). She lives in Halifax/K’jipuktuk, NS.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan