Chapter One
*January*
The year begins in silence,
not the silence of empty rooms
but the silence of rooms too full —
of things unsaid, of breath held
against the cold that presses
its flat palm to the window
and waits.
I make a list of what I will become.
By February it is already wrong.
*February*
Snow erases the garden
the way forgetting erases
a name you once said
in the dark to no one.
I watch the white collect
on the fence posts, each one
capped like a small monument
to something finished.
The radiator ticks.
The coffee cools.
Outside, a bird I cannot name
sits on a wire and does not sing,
and I think: yes. Exactly.