I’ve finished a novel and will see it published on December 27 of this year. Attending to a lot of the homework of promoting a new book, I find myself yearning for a new long-form story, wading through many plot, character, and title ideas, and yet frozen as the leaves that remain on the trees in this wintry month. I can’t summon energy to write scenes and do plot outlines, so I fall back into my home turf, poetry. Every image and moment of this month and the cold snap that has gripped the San Francisco region slows down my creative process, chips off excess words like breaking icicles off a roofline. I am as bare as the trees, as windy and skeletal. And that’s a good place from which to contemplate. Here’s a new thing.
Clouds Again
Full of alphabets spilling
secrets I can’t read but feel their import.
Like a town herald crying the news,
they float around town, garbed in shadow
as if to remind us we are invisible
to ourselves and misty to others,
then soon gone, taking
with us these strange conjunctions
of love and sorrow, feelings that roil
like tides, clouds, flocks, leaves, leaving
only the impressions deeper than bone
of what was and what comes next.
Rachel Dacus
12-16-22
1 thought on “Poetry as a Winter Sport”