Winter Gardening

Browns, russets and the yellowest gold.

A moody northern landscape,

but the light is wrong.

Digging produces the heavy scent

of soil and decay.

The dead leaves the frost has touched,

are thin and shrivelled in the bright, cold light.

The cystalline air sucks sound away.

A shovel striking rock,

makes a gritty shimmering sound,

that seems to hit a wall,

and can't travel.

Among the brownish, frost affected leaves,

scarlet geraniums glance off the eye,

like sunlight off water.

Flowers of a red so fevered,

it is as if they've survived an epidemic.

There is pleasure in finding life

in the midst of death.

The baby buried by an earthquake,

found alive.

The sole survivor of a shipwreck,

sighted drifting in a boat.

My healthy body works away.

I am still strong enough to break

the smaller branches with my hands.

My lungs pull in the cold air,

as if it is a medicine.

My skin heats.

The branches I break don't bleed sap.

This kind of gardening is a cleansing.

A rite.

The dead branches will burn.

And the smoke will smell sweet.

Like incense.