Frozen In

By Annie Finch b. 1956 Annie Finch

Venice, December

Ours are the only mouths

to taste with this smothering slow

touch, and the only steps

to sink like bellsounds and cave

deep into the marble snow.

Women who go to the window

to push their arms out to the snow

and then bring the shutters back in

past their eyes where the black night lives.

We are snowflakes at last, as the thick

never locked, never closed doors

their windows have left on the snow.

Once again, warmth that falls,

again, though our tracks fill and slow.

Source: Eve (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010)

Biography

Annie Finch is the author or editor of fifteen books of poetry, translation, and criticism, including the trilogy of poetry collections Eve (1997), Calendars (2003), and Spells, and the long poems The Encyclopedia of Scotland (2002) and Among the Goddesses: An Epic Libretto in Seven Dreams (2009). Calendars was shortlisted for the Foreword Poetry Book of the Year Award, and Eve reissued in the Carnegie Mellon Classic . . .

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