A Letter from the Thaw

Today the ice along the fence-line let go, all at once, in a sound like a book being closed in another room. I walked out to see. The dog came with me and did not bark, which is rare, and which I took as a kind of agreement. I have been trying, this winter, to write a poem about absence, and I have been failing in the particular way that tells me I am asking the wrong question of it. You cannot describe a room that is empty. You can only describe the shape of the thing that is missing from it. The thaw is not the end of winter. It is winter telling a story about itself. I am sending this letter because the thaw made me want to tell someone, and because you have always been, in my mind, the sort of person to whom one sends weather reports. I hope the cold is treating you gently where you are, and that the light is finding its way through your windows, even if only in thin slivers. With love, and with the first birds of February, — M.