Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

CLEOPATRA MATHIS
Journey in the Snow Season
l.
They are trying to make you safe
in the white bed, in the white room.
Heart, you think, webbed pattern
of crosses, how the flesh performs
its good rituals. But nothing stops this blood
from flowing: again it passes
the soft packets of tissue. Painless
you begin to say, though the gripped circle
of your waist is wrung and wrung.
2.
You have been looking at your hands.
They have become guests, removed and private.
You can't explain your life.
You only think of the ducks fluttering in the park
late at night, across from your own room,
the scream of the peacocks. You remember
one night the reindeer in their pen charged
and shook their antlers against the ice
as if it were spring. Taking lettuce, you found
two wild rabbits by the road. They let you feed them
and afterward, put their noses to your hand.
Over and over, you've watched the animals
live out their lives. The earth takes in water
or blood, indifferent to whatever falls.
In the spring the grass comes back thick and green.
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3.
You have loved your body for the wrong reasons.
How capable it is, and vain: it loves to walk
and lie down. Imagine the tiny roads
drawing into the heart; a house
visible through thin ribbed trees,
those intricate lines covered, as if by sleep.
When the snow begins, you are resting in that net
of branches. By now the deer will be perfectly still,
their noses lifted in the first snow.
You can see the white moon
over the clean white land. A veil of snow slides
from a branch; the particles of light fly out
and disappear. When the snow has left that simple
quiet,
sometimes a yearling will raise its stumpy antlers
and begin to dance, stirring the others
to rise and race across the pond. Furious,
they shake their heads, leaping at one another.
In the morning blood glistens on the ice.
Again this fall of cell and nerve
says nothing will last;
the young bones change and lie down.
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