the windows have frosted over
shattering pinprick traffic lights
into stellar beams

teahouse tables pushed to the side
soft swing music floats overhead
we shed our coats and our inhibitions

clasped hands and an arm draped
softly on the small of my back
we stumble and laugh

snow falls in the night air
the room warms with music and joy
and we dance

You know the feeling,
when you’re working on a puzzle
and you try a piece, it doesn’t fit
so you put it back?

You keep glancing at it,
But you think, that can't be it,
I tried that already!

But none of the others are fitting.
So you pick it back up.

And you realize that all along,
you just had to turn it the other way.

How surreal it is,
lofted above the wrinkles in the landscape,
where clouds settle like a dropped cloth
on peaks and valleys,
to find distance.

Yet how surreal to be grounded!
To reach overhead and let morning dew
travel down your fingers,
to explore the splintered surface
of golden timber not yet weathered.

The very air is different in those places so untouched,
smooth and unburdened.
You can fill yourself, let it in with a breath
and it will seek every crack and crevice,
it swirls in the lungs and mends.

You could just about leap -
cast yourself from the very pinnacle of earth,
Forget the stone which proffers you
an open palm to the waiting sky,
Let the renewing air cradle you,
lift you up and twist you around,
show you the world as it sees
the wrinkles in a quilted landscape.

Scramble your fingers
along the jagged earth
to find purchase.

Oh, the drop, the fall,
the catch of breath,
how it sings,
how it calls!

The boughs we dragged into the snow go up in flames,
they press against the darkness and wash me with warmth.
Matchbox in hand, you stand with the glow on your face,
and in the auburn light I still know the blue in your eyes.
Shadows across your cheeks send me spiraling
through a promenade of crystal eyes and letting go,
my fingertips crackling the way dry pine needles catch fire.

Hypnotic shimmers on the icy ground,
I lose myself in the swirling heat, to memory,
to smooth gray ice and mountain views
floating, following, weaving joy through stick-straight trees
the sweet mix of pride and new love
and the time of night where you get to know someone
I feel the vibrations of a familiar voice through my back,
wrapping through my ribcage
the way it did in our quietest moments,
and it tugs me back to the here and now.

Where the back of my legs are chilled swinging off a tailgate,
a soft country love song is a bittersweet reminder.
You wander restlessly and I know that the night is straining you.
I’d join you in a sung harmony, your fingers would drum a beat
and we’d piece our weekend plans back together.
I tell of mutual heartbreak to the solemn pines,
let the wind carry it away and leave space behind for healing.

I tip my head back towards the clouded sky
Imagining the sparks were the stars we couldn’t see
losing myself in the universe because
I couldn’t bear to lose myself in your eyes.

There are melodies in these hills.

They float through the portal,
an echo out of the canyon
in the far off mountains.

Or maybe it’s the whisper
and the ripple of the tall grasses
as the mist swirls over the fields.

Or the hum of a violin
in the high - roofed barn -

not the strings themselves, but rather
the way the notes play and tumble
in the peaked ceiling
and the way they leak from the windows
to dance in the deepening sunset.

Remember those days,
when we’d jump in the car and find ourselves
somewhere fifty miles south?

Or when we’d decide on a Wednesday
that it was the time for an adventure,
the purple pom pom on your dashboard
fluttering in the summer wind.

Where did those days go?

Why have we left them behind,
the exhilarating, spontaneous, unsure
best days of our lives?

We have traded them for days locked in,
watching the snow fall outside rather
than being the ones outside chasing it.