The Weight of Winter Beneath the snow the stalks of bamboo bend, and snow keeps falling, pushing them further until the leaves, like hands, touch the cold earth. How many times I spoke of such a fate that might fall me in turn, and spent my life bracing myself against the elements, attempting to catch each precious moment like a net across a river–and yet still they slipped away from me. I’ve lived half a life, with one foot always out the door in case I had to run away from choices or was not in the right house to begin with. I clung to things like drops of rain to branches and feared impermanence without knowing that change is all the permanence we get. How carefully I weighed the consequence of every choice, of every resolution, as if my mind could know the world in full. But you, my love, you see the world as simple. You do not tie a net from shore to shore to halt the ever-onward flow of time. You’ve pulled me from the door that stood ajar and made me rest my feet beside your hearth while outside, snow beats down our bamboo grove. But yet–bamboo’s spine is ever bending and winter’s weight can never break it clean. While oak trees’ rigid branches quickly snap, bamboo will always straighten back in spring. (untitled) "Those junipers don't matter," my brother said, sitting at the kitchen table. He'd been out all morning in his garden. His dark green coat hung dripping in the entry. The cold outside would make your wrists bristle in the space between coat and glove. The rain smeared the windows, the colors, the smells. He stared at his work, the dark little piles of dirt ringing the throats of the stubby trees. The wind was whipping their tapered branches like some vicious older sibling with a handful of hair. The soft groundcover that sloped and rose was now sunk beneath heavy pools of water streaming from the higher terraces. He was the only one in the dining room, staring through the blinds. He felt the distance from the sun so much deeper than the rest of us. Every season was a treasure: so much more than a color change or chills. He knew it would rain before the clouds did. He would tell us that he could smell snow in the air and feel the lightning before it flashed. He knew that moods could change faster than the weather and be far more dangerous. He knew when to wear an extra coat and when to silently climb the stairs. Like the night he was told that two weeks of sobriety meant nothing in the light cast by four years of drinks, four years of drugs. Fourteen days. What is that? Now the wall has a hole and the backdoor won't shut right. He finally climbed in a window after everyone else had gone to sleep. Gone to sleep. There are sharp edges in his three terraces. Stone, dirt, moss, stone. The tiny cracks in the border stones are not dirtied over, concealed with flat-bottomed tendrils. No, he blows them out and keeps them open. The rain splits them wider. The rusty leaves that drop are all taken away. His fingers, creased with dirt and autumn, grip the pruning shears so that white fleshy root is exposed to the wind. He's so delicate with that damned garden, treats it like a fresh wound. There's always one of us in the other room, watching him sit at the kitchen table. "Those junipers just don't matter," he says to himself as I get up to take care of his jacket. It's dripping everywhere.