Audio: Read by the author.
calls up a precision not quite
reducible, a winter-scape twigs
toward summer suns past—
wind-stripped, gnarled with bud
light at a slant gilding frost-cut roofs,
hasty even a century ago, temporary
and tenuous, a solution to shelter,
problems that lingered, mellowing—
I too half-curled, half-clutched
in bedclothes, writing the light full
then fitful as it ascends into cloud drift,
warm snarls of will among fluid states
this love a question of scale, frame,
rhythm made legible, lucid, what must
always, like faith, be liminal—this time
which can only be temporary, call it
homeland, firth, fallow field—here
the wind beats at the northeast edge,
here gutter-solder drips into groundwater,
here your head, this pillow, our fire.
Kim Garcia is the author of Drone (Backwaters), Tales of the Sisters (Sow’s Ear), Madonna Magdalene (Turning Point), and The Brighter House (White Pine). She teaches creative writing at Boston College.
