Sarah Rossiter

Crossing the lake in thick fog with nothing
to be seen except the buoy to starboard
marking the rock we didn’t want to hit
that Tom said we’d already passed but...

That’s what it’s called the men tell me
after our discussion of Matthew Five and
what it means to turn the other cheek,
or not, the latter being the path that...

This is the season, trees stripped
clean and what was hidden now
is seen, the path that leads into
the woods, the littered leaves,
the crooked walls that once marked...

"More later" ends her every note but
"more" or "later" never comes so what
is more I'll never know though later
I can understand as weeks and months...

Kneeling on Boston Common it's this foot,
naked, resting in my lap with clean towel,
socks, warm water waiting, that tells me
this is what happens after a cold winter
...

I hoped that you might show yourself
for after all we'd often talked of what
might happen after death but so far
there is only this; the way leaves shook...

It was once in early May, a raw day,
Bitter, on a western creek, I crouched
Beneath a weeping willow, expecting
Nothing, resting really, the black back...

in a pink shirt the reporter speaks
his voice ripe with excitement while
behind him the Wave crashes over
and over the same bodies flung
like broken sticks which in an instant...

Before the solstice in December when
trees stand stripped on granite ground,
I hear them in the woods at dusk,
their hollow hooting back and forth,...

The readiness is all, he says, but I’m not
ready, not for this: the bluebird back before
her time—that is, if she ever left—the winter
soft as summer mist when pink buds swell...

There are tracings in the snow-filled field,
Tracks I see but cannot read; except the deer’s
Small heart-shaped prints, the rest remains
A mystery. And so, I think of Hebrew script,...

“When you pray, go into your room,” He said,
so each green dawn as spring light stirs, I sit,
womb-snug, in my small room, hushed high
above unfurling leaves, with Luke who’s all...

It’s the coat I notice first, several sizes
too big, and blue as the sea, an ocean
to drown in, and clearly not hers. It was,
I guessed, his, just two months dead, and...

As I stood, rooted, winter-locked, my hand
outstretched in southern sun, the lizard leapt
to the branch of my arm as if there was nothing...

He didn’t see me which is why I was able
To sit beneath him in bare woods, close enough
To almost touch his six-inch prehistoric beak,
Curved scimitar that searched and tapped...