Wishing for Snow by Minrose Gwin

Author:Minrose Gwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

When I wrote this letter, I was thinking about how my mother was translating her life into another language. She had begun to keep a notebook called “Words to Keep,” in which she listed words that especially struck her. She was reading the dictionary as if it were a good novel. In her poems she brandished nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs like flaming swords. Her poems felt hot on the page. I had begun to wonder whether she were having an affair.

CERES SPEAKS

Deep in the earth’s belly

I hear the first twinge

of the oarlock and the boat

bumping ashore.

His big black barge is richly appointed

with jeweled scepters of onyx

and great black pearls to brandish

before her eyes like Morpheus

enthralling her back for one more night

in his arms.

This time I followed her to the bottom

of winter, those icelocked caverns

of the heart thrumming

to the dark muffled cadence

of the river.

Earth and sky flash by,

the dark and light of it

over and under and back again,

bearing her away from me

with every stroke of the oar.

When spring roused her,

I became the clod of earth

pillowing her head, a lodestone

to lure her back from

the cold dark somnolence of time.

Her seasons rise now and throb

in my throat. Better veins

icelocked forever—

than this interminable thawing.

ERIN CLAYTON PITNER

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