Old Man Winter

POEM | Mark Smith-Soto

February’s frozen rain drapes the backyard in its glistening spell,

traps the mind in cold decades deep: Home again.

I felt like dying, something not said: words to scatter crows over the fields.

Might as well come late and bare-chested to the dinner table, might as well burp or chew with your mouth open,

transgressions

that got you slapped at six-thirty in the evening over the breaded veal cutlet and potato.

you never said you hated winter, you admitted little. But now I feel it, Pop,

as if the early fog reached through the window to hold us together, as we so seldom were,

staring out at the hollies in their stricken glory.