Snow Angel

The burden of the season

I used to take pictures of shadows on the wall
cast by clear glass jars filled with wilting flowers —
picked weeks before on a day that I tried
after a warm stretch reached through the shiver of winter —
as the first signs of the sun soaked in through
the windows looking out onto the faded
brown nowhere, the color of late February
when everything’s given up and dried out, is
cracking and choking, when we’re desperate for anything
to smooth over the splinters that form where we break

I wanted to soothe myself by capturing something
like the freedom I’d lost, all golden and light and fleeting
I’d been crying over the night before when
I’d let another day pass and not be the day
that I saved myself, and here it was again,
morning, and I was so thirsty, brittle,
basically bones, but so saturated with grief
that I sank back into the mattress, pulling the covers
over my head like the gravity of the life I was under,
pretending it was a sheet of glittering snow I could
burrow underneath like a fox or rabbit whose soft fur turned
white in winter, the prospect of staying in bed another day
as artificial and comforting as the imitation snow
from an old movie set or the kind flurrying
inside a snow globe, not real consolation,
but as close as I could get

I felt safe and enclosed and welcomed the escape
of sleep as I thought about my determination months prior
in decorating our Christmas tree all by myself, in shifts
as my spirit and strength would allow
Some of its crisp pine needles were still littered back behind
the washer and dryer where the cat would bat them around
with his soft, pink paws, scattering them along
with the pieces of an ornament that broke when the branch snapped
under its weight: a glass angel trying to spread her wings,
too heavy for flight

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