WINTER LIGHT

When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.
—Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Early March. The ice stretches thin
over the pond’s dark
face. Now and then
a skater falls through,
does not come up. The buds
flush green, retreat
into their shells. In the immensity
of my forgetting, in the quiet
space of a single gesture, there,
a sprig of lavender appears
beside your hand. I hear
the first movement of Beethoven’s
Second, but that
is just the phonograph. All day
our sitting room brims
with sound. I should have
held you in the winter light,
held you
even as you held yourself against it.