-
What Yields to Winter
- The Kent State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
224 the widows’ handbook What Yields to Winter Ann Cefola Soft earth, soft hayed earth, last pumpkins dotting the straw field, dead mouse-dirt road. Pale butternut coins shivering like parchment. Leaves, tossed and crumpled, each one, as if by hand. Saying poplar or white pine, the tree man needs to cut wood from wire. And what refuses: Ancient pines, like stallions roaring on a rope, against iced wind. Snow like last ghostly moths of summer. Lone birch a chalk mark. Four poplar branches suggesting everything has a frame. I enter my yard as a scythe, O birch; I repeat poplar, white pine, and the cutter pats their bark, tenderness for what he must take. Sorrow what overtakes me: Elegant silk pulley, birch looks to open sky. Nevertheless you must stretch toward it, she says. Try. ...