Molly Fisk

How valuable it is in these short days, threading through empty maple branches, the lacy-needled sugar pines. Its glint off sheets of ice tells the story of Death’s brightness, her bitter cold. We can make do with so little, just the hint of warmth, the slanted light. The way we stand there, soaking in it, mittened fingers reaching. And how carefully we gather what we can to offer later, in darkness, one body to another.

Early December, dusk, and the sky slips down the rungs of its blue ladder into indigo. A late-quarter moon hangs in the air above the ridge like a broken plate and shines on us all, on the new deputy almost asleep in his four-by-four, lulled by the crackling song of the dispatcher, on the bartender, slowly wiping a glass and racking it, one eye checking the game. It shines down on the fox’s red and grey life, as he stills, a shadow beside someone’s gate, listening to winter. Its pale gaze caresses the lovers, curled together under a quilt, dreaming alone, and shines on the scattered ashes of terrible fires, on the owl’s black flight, on the whelks, on the murmuring kelp, on the whale that washed up six weeks ago at the base of the dunes, and it shines on the backhoe that buried her.