I miss you

1.29.15

The snow that was supposed to be a burying
is a light thing, already diminished.
Ice in the gutter melts in hard drops.
The sound through the wall wakes me where
I'm sleeping sick in my sister's bed,
and first I think it's a woodpecker.

And then body pain keeps me awake
for a long time.  I remember a dream
in which I hiked up through an orchard
with my mother as it got dark.
I didn't know what fruit, and was barefoot,
which I could feel all the way to my stomach.

It was not because of thorns,
or any sharpness.
Poetry for me is the fight to explain
what I could feel then, and why.
But short months
fly.  I write nothing.