Coming Home on a January Evening
Stamping off snow and darkness,
we enter the warmth of home,
wood-burning stove radiating heat.
The standing lamp and wing chair
invite me to settle and take up my book
left open on the pine-wood chest.
Root-knotted within its pot,
our forty-four-year-old fig tree
canopies over the worn couch,
still sporting shoots, green and tender.
Together, we have made this space,
a charmed place of clement weather,
deepness between us, unspoken.
I fear things that have yet to happen:
one of us confused by what a light switch is for,
the hidden billow of a ruptured blood vessel,
our fig tree sickening, stove cold, lamp unlit—
love when there is no answer….
• • •
Elizabeth Weir grew up in England and lives in Minnesota. Her book of poetry, High on Table Mountain, was published by North Star Press and was nominated for the 2017 Midwest Poetry Book Award. Her work has appeared in BoomerLitMag, Evening Street Review, North Meridian Review, Gyroscope, The Kerf and Turtle Island Quarterly.