March 2023
Bio Note: As I prepare these poems for VV, I'm fighting the tail end of a Covid infection — after so many months of mask wearing, caution, and isolation. To have this pile on top of the release of my new book One Bent Twig – my love poems for trees I've planted, loved and worried over during deforestation and climate change. The shortest month and in some ways the longest.
Old Snow
Today I know this self as old snow
where sleet fell on yesterday’s inches
to make a thin crust that cannot hold
the traveler up. Who will sink and lurch.
Leaving boot holes, a pegboard.
So old that wind-shaken bits of twigs
and pinecones have found surface rest
with me to settle and return to dirt.
I will be water.
The End of February in Vermont
I hear you. Crocuses come up gold
or purple-and-white striped –
where you are, your elsewhere. Or buds
on blueberries know two-day ice of a silver thaw.
Here everything has icicles.
Nothing scintillates more than sun through ice
only to find out that this full moon takes hanging
ice to the eerie place and contorts shadows
of the hickory on deep snow to tell
a north woods Winter’s Tale of sorting
truth from suspicion and love from theatricality.
The lighting could not be more perfect.
©2023 Tricia Knoll
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