CORM

The trance of earliest morning, all birdsong gone,

and the slam of pipes offering up clumsy warmth.

Then the fled seasons thrive in mind only,

the way the young rhododendron furls each leaf

lengthwise as the temperature drops, then pops

its parasols up in the few hours of white light

the middle of a day tosses down.  What you cannot love

you try, anyway, to live beside until familiarity fills

the gap.  Even when the day’s down to a trickle

in the hard corm of winter, we have lamps

sucking the sockets for gold skirts under which

we huddle with books and the latest wooly technology,

also perhaps, tea, which we don’t love either,

though for honey, the warm spoon, the way the steam

of a rolling boil rounds up into a veritable soft fruit

in the palms. So too the little prickle of fever

years after the marriage has gone cold-- the scent

that rises out of the child’s clean head-- so exactly that

which once made us fierce enough to pull him

from the last green channels buckling in ice.

Leslie Adrienne Miller's collections of poems include The Resurrection Trade (Graywolf, 2007), Eat Quite Everything You See, Yesterday Had a Man In It, Ungodliness and Staying Up For Love. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Best American Poetry 2007.  Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, Miller holds degrees in creative writing and English from Stephens College, the University of Missouri, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the University of Houston.