Come, you whisper. I run
down the triple switchback,
don’t stop to lift my fallen
fleece glove. I find you
in seizure, shivering, slumped
silent on a rock or massive tree roots.
(Years later, I will seek the spot.)
Snow covers you
in your too-thin jacket.
(How did I let you wear only that?)
911 sends a fire truck
instead of an ambulance.
Let’s go home. Let’s go home, you whisper.
I hate not knowing what’s best.
A hiker retrieves the fallen
glove and our car, forges
up Forbidden Drive,
her two goldens panting,
smiling, circling, leaving
paw prints all over
cognac-colored seats—lives—
changing hourly—
in heavy snow.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 22, Issue 4.
Doris Ferleger is a winner of the New Letters Poetry Songs of Eretz Prize, Montgomery County Poet Laureate Prize, Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, and the AROHO Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among others. She is the author of three full volumes of poetry: Big Silences in a Year of Rain (finalist for the Alice James Books/Beatrice Hawley Award), As the Moon Has Breath, and Leavened, as well as a chapbook entitled When You Become Snow. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Psychology and maintains a mindfulness-based therapy practice in Wyncote, PA.
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