The Silver Bowl
For Brian Gawlik
There’s four inches of snow
on the green hedge outside of your window
that looks as perfect as a birthday cake,
behind it,
a leafless winter crabapple
holding white line branches.
It’s the first legitimate snow this year–
inevitable in December.
We’ve been waiting
for the onslaught of real winter:
blueblack morning’s cold house
the somber afternoons melding too quickly into night,
the silencing snow.
And somehow, we’re relieved that it has finally begun in earnest.
I know that you’ve been waiting, too,
carrying that secret inevitability in your blood,
the same way Nature promises the return of a season.
And somehow, you must be relieved that it has finally begun–
if only to know that it will end,
the dreadful anticipation over at last.
When you were ready to leave us,
I dreamed that I handed you a silver bowl,
large enough to carry the new infant of yourself into spring.