When the last rifle-shots of the season ring out
across the river—swollen thick with rain and mud,
moving forward as everything must—
snow glistens along the bank’s dark crown
and you understand nothing changes down here:
not the smell of wood smoke or January’s damp air,
the top-heavy sky working its way overhead.
It’s a new year, and by now you know better
than to make resolutions, though you wish
you could move like those gold-rimmed clouds, your body
half a heaven, drifting someplace easier.
It’s almost enough to linger on the porch this evening
imagining the wind up there, the rafters of stars
hidden behind all that blue. You would wade
the blushed horizon, disappear across sun-struck hills.
You would ferry this light from one world to the next.