January
       

She saw how the trees' shadows lay down
with the shadows already collected
inside each footprint in the snow—which
wasn't white, exactly,
but a color that leaned like the trees'
shadows leaned (the trees unbalanced
by the sun's thinning glow)—the snow,
was it blue? no, the color of afterthought,
maybe, of imitated light—

and here she wavered, but not the shadows
(those sharp replies), not the bristling
wreckage of leaves that breached
the snow. Not the footprints that walked away.

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Copyright © 2012 Katharine Rauk All rights reserved
from Basil
Black Lawrence Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission