I went out looking for flowers for you
When even the daffodils hadn't yet peeked out.
I imagined myself finding three white flowers,
Pale maidens, quiet and starchy and stiff.
I imagined them singing you to sleep,
And it kept me warm while I looked.
I found none on the cold brown forest floor,
Covered in moldy ice and
Leaves transformed into ugly panes of glass.

The trees' branches were so thin,
Just curled and knotted black rope
Against a clean sky, white as a hospital sheet.
The boughs tangled up in bows,
And I wished that I could take them
And gather them in a vase for you, like flowers.
Like any picture written in branches,
If I shifted slightly,
They tangled at different points,
And I could never have gathered those new pictures.
Not in a million years...

Everything around me was the blank white of things asleep,
All bones and marble and the cotton at the top of a pill bottle.
I stood in that white so long my face felt red.
I went inside.
It felt wrong to abandon my quest,
But I knew it was thankless, fruitless,
Stupid to look for flowers in winter.
I knew, too, it could do you no good,
Whether you had flowers or not.

How like you it was that you should go
When the flowers did
And leave me with nothing
To offer.