Home, First Winter

after Sarah Burke

I expected a fist of steel mills
puffing soot. A grid of icy streets
luging into a mountainside.
Damn if your river’s too
toxic to touch, your winter
a dusk that never ends,
your roads wending and
wending. This, all of
this—my calves sore
from walking up hill
after hill. My back sore
shoveling snow and falling
as I salt. The drive-thru
voice spitting, I can’t
understand you. What could
I have expected? Not tunnels
that open out of darkness
into a bridge so full of light
I wanted to sing
church hymns. Your spring
the hue of hydrangea
bluing again, their small eyelids
shivering. Or the lilies
tangled in their wild joy.

Helena Mesa is the author of Horse Dance Underwater and a co-editor for Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. Her poems have appeared in various literal journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches at Albion College.