After the Affection of a Late Autumn

Image:  Created by ChatGPT inspired by “After the Affection of a Late Autumn”

After the Affection of a Late Autumn

They wore winter
Like a blazer keeps
Shoulders square
Almost military design.

In the pockets of poems
They slipped dry ice
& hung frigid at the end
Of each line.

Where they crashed
Icicles hung naked reminders
In the window
Where thawing is dripping to death.

In the thick of it
The fabric
Of a patchwork affair
Quilted them from each other.

Yet the dreams that seemed
To lodge them between sheets of ice
Caught spring spilling down a mountain
Glancing off her shoulder

The glacial waters that fed her amazement
That anything so cold can move.
Now that summer runs at the mouth
Slow as sorghum on the lip of a jar

She hitches her poems
To farmers on tractors
& plows the itch for his love
Which has scratched her into dirt that burns.