That kind of weather:

zip up your jacket

but leave your hat at home.

Ice squeaks under boots now

as water squirms below it, over

broken slabs of sidewalk.

Last night filled my eyes

with blankets, deep in pillows

our muffled heartbeats drummed.

Kids at the bus stop, orange light

glancing harshly over lunchboxes,

the crossing guard’s beard exposed

a half block from my porch: I nod,

he nods back the distance, presses

the crosswalk button to let the college line turn

and take me off to work. Last night

we lay between a body and a cold place,

but today I see only air

and through it, colored things

like signs and trees, and everyone

awake and surprised in the eight o’clock now—

we step single file onto frozen heaps

like Shackletons going anywhere else,

our shirttails tucked and ready.

John Linstrom is series editor of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press. His poems and nonfiction have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, the New Criterion, the Antioch Review, and elsewhere.

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Published in the June 15, 2018 issue: View Contents
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