What is one to do,
when the painful grasping of youth
returns to its reach,
not having captured its gain?

The incandescent orange
of a sky at dusk,
midwinter’s stark black
draws willow lines up from snow

blue-white, settled in to stay,
hard as concrete,
as real as anything gets.
This, too, shall pass.

It is only half of who we are.
A quarter, an inch –
comes a deluge, returns the drought,
the burden of harvest,

a season of doubt.