Snowshoe to Otter Creek

By Stacie Cassarino b. 1975 Stacie Cassarino

love lasts by not lasting
—Jack Gilbert

I’m mapping this new year’s vanishings:

lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces.

This is not a story of return.

There are times I wish I could erase

the mind’s lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays,

my fervor to be touched

by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body

back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods

with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes

the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek

where I stand like a stranger to my life.

There is no single moment of loss, there is

an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle

in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard.

Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out

with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?

Source: Zero at the Bone (New Issues Press, 2009)

ABOUT THIS POEM

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Poet Stacie Cassarino b. 1975

POET’S REGION U.S., Western

Subjects Living, Separation & Divorce, Relationships, Love, Nature, Winter, Heartache & Loss

Poetic Terms Free Verse

More about this poem

Stacie Cassarino earned a BA from Middlebury College in Vermont and an MA from the University of Washington. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, Iowa Review, AGNI, Georgia Review, Indiana Review, and other journals. Her first collection of poetry is Zero at the Bone (2009).

The voice in Cassarino’s lyric poems is both familiar and solitary as it explores urban and natural landscapes as well as the complications of . . .

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