Not sure when it began, this growing
ache for woods although daily I drive
between patches of scrub oaks and
pines that do well in sandy soil.

Faintly, I hear the woods that sang
at night on the winds of childhood,
soughing outside my bedroom windows
every season, even in winter when snow

linked the trees like their wandering
network of roots. Many days I followed
deer prints in the creek, or animal paths
in and out of thorny tangles.

The Great North Woods haunted my
dreams, and I entered them, seeking
again the little cottage whose windows
welcomed me with candles—who waited

for me to open the door to a fire in the
hearth, a pot of hot soup, and a gentle dog
whose paws trembled as it chased dream
rabbits among the shivering pines.

Just past the Solstice here in this corner
of the Northern Hemisphere, light is hard
to come by, drops too soon behind a tangle
of bare branches or hides behind buildings
as scarlet fades to gray on the horizon.

Folding into ourselves, our arms warming
our own ribs, we want to wear light,
to drape it like a shawl over our cold
shoulders or wrap it like a scarf
around our vulnerable necks.

And yet, when we watched the first snow
together from a dark room, cocooned in
a nest of quilts as it spiraled and fell beneath
the streetlights, we held each other close,
accumulating light.