By Ralph Earle
[First published in The Way the Rain Works (Sable Books, 2015) and republished here by permission of the author.]
She had a flair for choosing
clothes that made me look good but
that winter after she moved out
I craved sleet and darkness. I carried
into the twilight every Christmas
sweater she had given me, fastening
the cardigan with blue argyle to a
limb, then turning through the trees
to my task, ice cascading on the last
leaves, the soft purple pullover
on a sapling, the loose-knitted
wistful-looking one hung on a vine.
In the morning on the sparkling hillside
the sweaters blazed in their icy
sheathes like phantoms of clothing
we will wear in the other world.
Three nights I waited. Then,
ghosts having fled, I gathered
the moonlit flock, the forsaken ones.
They shivered in my embrace
and rubbed against me, awakening.
| Copyright © 2018 by Ralph Earle |
Another poem pregnant with meaning from poet master Ralph Earle, with another antique allusion, perhaps, in those THREE nights of waiting for the GHOSTS to flee?
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