By Jason Ranek

I’ve waited long on a cutting edge of wind,
on rumors sung between two distant birds,
to give us more than the conjectures
of Farmers’ Almanac concerning winter. 
But I am left to my own miscalculations
As to why limbs of a barren tree awaken
Memories of desire, why the prospect

of coming cold turns me to thoughts of love. 
Once singular in our affections as two rivers
merging, we scraped a life together
out of stubbornness, a rainfall for nothing
on corn and winter wheat, windfall
in the market price per head of cattle. 
Nights, my body prospered in your hands,

and in pre-dawn dark you put your boots on
by the bed and ventured into the into the fields. 
When you returned, your eyes were lit
with happiness, as if the sky had opened
like a flame and left you awestruck. 
If your trips to town became a quiet habit,
more often leaving me alone to morning

chores, how could I have known that time
exacted payment for familiarity? 
Love turned t the discipline of marriage,
the joy of work to a tedium of routine. 
Now, the old affections locked in ice, time
marks hours of indifferent silence broken
only by the paper’s solemn ritual: you

with your crossword, me with my obituaries. 
Even my dreams reckon with the season—
a plot of open earth choked with snow,
dead leaves twisting on a gust of wind. 
I was certain we would never touch again,
but a crispness in the air, a flood of sunlight
washing shadows from your face,

rouses forgotten memories from sleep.
My heart’s last embers, gone to dust,
nearly revive at the thought of love—precise
as it is perennial in dealings with the flesh.
But if I long to give that tenderness
by which we kindled kinship into being,
I am tempted now to wound you by refusal,
past the reach of time to heal refusal’s sting.

No momento of the light, no false appeasement
to ease my journey into darkness, can clear
a life together spent alone. But let us
linger here awhile, our hearts all memory
and bone, autumn twilight falling soft
against our bodies, into fragile space between.