February Chill Poem by Matty Reynolds

The darkness settles in the darkest just before dawn.
You can smell the dew stuck like oily tears to the blades of grass.
And if you really listen you can hear the cool solitude in
The warble of the magpies and shouts of the jays just before dawn.
Then the sullen clap when the predawn orchestra stops-
Taken a back from the brightness of the first ray of a new day,
Saddened by the stark realization of time's perpetual motion.
The undertaking of another day, a new task.

And I am alone. Twelve months older,
And the morning is still consistent with visions
Of waking in your arms. Consumed with watching
The light drive into every crevasse, every nook.
Light on the chair and the walls and the blanket.
There is no other warmth than that of sunshine on your toes.
That light which I continuously watched brighten you in the dawn
Of late May beside me. You so close to me. Never close enough.
I am never to wake like this again, whatever came has went.
Was taken. Was given away.

The pansies and violas still sprouted early from the earth,
The February chill would not deny them their beauty.
They do not know all has changed and that this frost won't thaw.
The zinnias and marigolds are all sprouted and brilliant!
The corn silks grow still, oblivious to the fact that you are gone.
The seasons move on the wind, change is everywhere but in me.
Apples come, as does the month for their color; their ripening, and fall-
Ah, the season of fall- It's brown and orange shades of warmth,
The purple, yellow and amber mums call me to a path forgotten
By all except the one whose lost in that path, lost in that past.
Our path where we walked, and smiled, and kissed, and laid;
Naked bodies in that clearing holding fast to a love forbidden.
The bark of you spreads, the roots of me tighten.
Though today be the last time, or tomorrow a past I cannot reclaim,
You will not mind. You will smile just the same.

That you may not remember the details or juxtapositions does not matter.
It is that you look forward and feel no regret for the loss of love,
The joy in your voice at this new place that has me here so frozen.
I shall not be with you again. What we knew, even now is scattered and ruined.
You will smile and journey on where the sun never sets; rise like a butterfly
And move from flower to flower, and lift away like dust before the rain.

You have been gone a long season.
And have less than any desire who were lover with lover.
And I have life—that old reason to wait for what comes,
To leave what is over.