1.

 

There are people who love
winter, and you were one

 

 

lover of winter, long nights
and repose for a soul dose

of Faulkner or Flannery O.
Dickinson made a strong

 

chaser, a bullet for sleep
in the winter, a draught

 

straight from a shot glass
when finally your blue

 

purpled lips and wintery
body begged for a fire.

 

 

2.

 

Winter is still far away.
Bougainvillea winds the iron fence.
The basil bed idles green in full sun.

 

Chives, rosemary, dill
need harvesting; lovage and sorrel sputter out
punished by this heat wave.

 

All I need is a heart of garlic
and three tomatoes. All I need is you stocking
my kitchen, my salt, my gazpacho.

 

 

3.

 

Your daughter came in winter
after you died. She had questions.

 

Still. Still, all she wanted was
to bask in the light of books

 

you and I had read together,
to sip coffee in mugs chipped

 

in your day, to look away
out my still wide window

 

at the gray sky, the grackles
moving in the ice-broken oak.

Jane has a Master’s in Creative Writing from University of Central Oklahoma. She is a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellow and teaches poetry at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.  Her most recent book is What Can Be Saved . Link to other poems and talk with her at janevincenttaylor.blogspot.com.