At the end of my midwinter dusk run
the lights are coming on in the houses
Just enough darkness to travel back
Not enough light and just enough darkness
To pretend -
The cars are depression era gloomy and overgrown.
I run by your childhood home,
And there you are in the living room -
Hair swept back - Black Irish Mayo good looks
You and your brothers sprawled around the immense radio
All gangly legs and arms of youth
The King has just abdicated
And your mother so moved to tears hearing his voice

Static, lovely and sad stretched out over an ocean.
Maybe I think there is a certain power
or prayer in a vision
My twenty something self lost your fifty something self,
And I stand here foolish
stopped dead in my tracks.
Lifting my arms up reaching you through the light of the windows
I hear your voice,
A seventeen year old voice I never knew
“Save a piece of pie for Daddy”
“Daddy” said in a dipthong lingual last vestige
Of your Lake Ontario summers.

I drag my breath through the cold night
Late February Oaks and Maples line my street
like looming giants
their dark finger branches hold up the night’s canvas.
A sudden wind and drops of ice and hail
Stabbing my face, unyielding,
Huffing and puffing as fast as I can over the crest of the hill
John calls out to me high pitched and worrisome.
Like a parent - he pulls me in the door of our house,
I am all tears and breathless as he hugs me saying
“You must be freezing - you’re covered in ice”
The crystals and chunks fall from me like a kind of cage
Breaking on the sidewalk and spilling into the hall.

The sky is an inky black now
And I know I am not young anymore-
But face pressed against the glass like a little girl
I listen to the ice filling the streets
Like many whispers.