SANDY COOMER

Traveling North with Grief

Winter. My breath, a mist rising
beneath yellow tamarack trees.
The wind shifts. Golden needles
float down, spear my hair.
I am decorated for death.
I walk by the lake. Ice-crusted sand.
Footprints of a dog. Brown speckled
stones. I am thirty miles from Canada,
a thousand miles from your body
in warmer ground. But, winter. Winter.
I name the face I see in the mirror, Winter.
I open my coat, let what’s bitter and clean
burn through me. A winter reckoning.
The winter, brittle, star-torn wreck of me.
Someone lit a fire in a cabin. Wood smoke
filters with memory of flame. And the lake
shifts in its shallow banks. And the tamaracks
glitter. Winter. The narrow trail is braided
with roots. The promise of an overlook.
I practiced grief for a decade. Now,
from the heights, against the jagged edge
of mountain, I call for you. The white sky
swallows your name. A single offering.
I thought the cold would mock me.
I wanted the cold to ruin me. I owed you
that much. To suffer in remembrance.
A winter banishment. The papery skin
of river birch. The aspen trembling.
The wordless yellow-gold tamaracks
listening. And winter kissing the sky-stung
silence as if love could solve everything.

Sandy Coomer is a poet, artist, Ironman athlete, and social entrepreneur from Nashville, TN. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks and a full-length collection, Available Light (Iris Press). Sandy is a poetry mentor in the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program and the founding editor of the online poetry journal Rockvale Review. She is the founder and director of Rockvale Writers’ Colony in College Grove, TN, a not-for-profit organization that exists to support, promote, and educate writers of all genres and backgrounds. Her favorite word is “believe.”