“Snowshoe to Otter Creek” - Stacie Cassarino
love lasts by not lasting —Jack Gilbert I’m mapping this new year’s vanishings: lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces. This is not a story of return. There are times I wish I could erase the mind’s lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays, my fervor to be touched by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek where I stand like a stranger to my life. There is no single moment of loss, there is an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard. Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?
