Winter-Chill, and Other Excuses
Partridge, Dixie
Winter-Chill, and Other Excuses Admit it. You love the idleness and brawn of these red boulders, warming through early morning. You must learn to come and go, how to move from drifts you have...
...And you, you laze on slickrock, baking like a brick, slow in translation...
...Russet pillars around you collect sun, steam faintly, snow-melt taken in like a quenching...
...But it's spring on these terra-cotta plateaus, though to the east LaSal peaks erupt dazed white into blue...
...No matter how you've eased into mild winters where you live now, in sleep there are blizzards closing roads, farm fence posts up to their necks in snow...
...You must learn to come and go, how to move from drifts you have been crossing, how to rescue the car churning far back in a childhood snowbank...
...Dixie Partridge...
...Across the canyon: a thin crystal falling of water-a whisper...there only a few days in spring...
...Each year the face at the frozen window where you scratched your name is younger still...
Vol. 130 • March 2003 • No. 6
