Return to Winter

Elaine Terranova

That day the starlings didn't eat.
That day was a sudden return
to winter. In the fields,
snow on a base of ice.

The birds couldn't bear
to set down except
on the clear face
of the road they remembered.

My husband leaned on the horn
the way you lean on a railing
until they lifted
before the unstoppable metal.

I pushed into the floorboard
as if I were doing the driving,
as if I could halt
the laws of physics,
while somewhere, my brother's chest
rose and sunk and rose.

So much you take for granted,
like going to sleep in spring
that you will wake in spring.
That the blossoms were right
to push out, there was
no contradiction.

But when we hit the slick
and slammed hard against
our own forward motion,
the roadbank spun
and the orchard of stunted trees
that had just begun to soften.

What with foresight and dancing, gypsies would seem to pass easily between worlds. The hummingbird too— only a moth with a beak— Have I ever heard it hum? Yet it's everywhere welcome, coaxed by red flowers, even sugar water, for we are devious, in our desires. And the dead, we embody them for our own purposes. I can't talk to a shadow, to an abstraction. A sun worshiper, my brother, always raising his face to it. One touch and the body roar quieted. Now, though I walk the length of the park, he is not there. He is nowhere under the sun. I want the dead but I am with the living. The tulips raise up their hands. The lunch crowd swallows me.

Already, we'd be driving past those trees, that part of the forest. Even briefly, it refreshed you. It was like mint in August though that sting would be gone with summer. The ground tarnishing first, and soon the leaves. I thought then, men don't stop. They want so much to get on. What we said, incidental yet hammered into the mind. Talk like a magnet, so it draws you together or away. We made a line around that part of the forest, the exact shape of our attention. Even after, I remember how it was taken up and moved along with us, into the dim living room. Each holding a glass, ice colliding in water. A tiny mirrored sun caught in the trees. The same sadness that darkened our features. Later, bed without making love, without the chance of a reprieve.

In the heat, in the high grass their knees touched as they sat crosslegged facing each other, a lightness and a brittleness in their bodies. They touched like shells. How odd that I should watch them say goodbye. What did it have to do with me? There was my own stillness and the wasps and the tiny flies for a long time taking stitches in the surrounding air and a comfort I felt, as the wind tore through, to find the trees miraculously regaining their balance.

Poems

Return to Winter

More by Elaine Terranova

Hummingbird

Mint

Shells

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Return to Winter

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