And no vicious freeze or blowing snow.
Poem free of hints of birds—tube
of sunflower seeds, a fallen block of suet.
There’s no night outside the picture
window here, no animal shadow
hunched under the feeder. No clouds
or great horned owl in dead oak. No glimpse
of limp, of injured foreleg. Nothing
wary or skittish. No acute
sense of smell, no watchful dog.
This poem can’t see in the dark—lacks
the gleaming cave walls at
the back of animal eyes. Here,
there’s no barking, no crack
in the clouds sufficient to let moon
shine in. Also, no turning away:
no moves, myths, gods. And no allusions—
forget recollections in tranquility
and daffodils. No, it’s winter: too cold
for voltas, rhyme, meter; too cold
to change or save anything. This
is a poem with nothing but winter
and three-legged and hungry in it—
even if the suet’s gone, even if you think
you saw something hobbling away—
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 5.
Jennifer Stewart Miller is the author of Thief (2021), winner of the 2020 Grayson Books Poetry Prize, A Fox Appears: A Biography of a Boy in Haiku (2015), and a chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press 2020). Her poems have lately appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, RHINO, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and a JD from Columbia University.
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