Midwinter – Michael Goodfellow

You shaped a fallen tree limb after a storm
when the wind turned south to northwest
as each fall the house settled into the shape of winter:

the first frost,
joists heaved and creaking, finish crackling.
The morning after I reached for you,

wind the quiet of blown glass, branches lit up with tide glint,
each bud ending in daylight,
ground littered with stormfall.

The fire I piled high
with dead wood from the others
lit the night with the scent of pine tar and sap,

boiled hard, like canning fruit.
In the dark you made forms with your hands

that there would be no record,
that it would be branch caught and turned

skyward, the storm’s name
bone memory, wet timber and fossil.

Michael Goodfellow’s first poetry collection, Naturalism: An Annotated Bibliography is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press. His poems have appeared in Bear Review, The Dalhousie Review, CV2, Prairie Fire, The Nashwaak Review, The Cortland Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Measure Review, Matter, Reliquiae and elsewhere. He lives in Nova Scotia.