A Walk in Winter
Susan McLean

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Scattered through the woods, the lofty oaks,
arrayed in plushy fitted bodysuits
of ivy, like a sylvan cast of Cats,
stand fixed in tortured postures that evoke
lost souls in Dante’s wood of suicides.
Each reaching limb implores a second chance.
Like spell-struck giants, their green eminence
towers above the gray hordes on all sides,
naked and quaking in the gusts that blow.

This isn’t hell, or even death. The sap
is surging even now. What seems inert
is drinking energy from taps below,
which, pulsing into every twig, will wrap
bare bones in new life risen from the dirt.

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Susan’s notes:​​ “While caring for my terminally ill mother, I tried to fight off depression by taking daily walks through a nearby public park. Writing was my other escape. But I learned that even when I didn’t mention myself, my inner landscape imposed itself on what I saw. This poem, in an earlier form, originally appeared in The Lyric.”

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Susan McLean is a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University. She has published two poetry collections, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Latin poems by Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her third poetry book, Daylight Losing Time, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press.

 

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