A Lot I Know

by Anna Odessa Linzer*

from her recent collection of poems in Season Unleashed

My meditation walk takes me along the same worn path,

always new, always silently speaking to me,

and today I see how the fern fronds are

raggedly chopped off, as by a sharp scythe slung

by madman or a child,

along the path, under fir and cedar,

and then I recognize the desperate deer hunger

eating what is inedible on every other

week of the year

and I know that we have reached,

fallen into,

the bottom of winter.

Returning, just outside the meditation room, I see delicate

white snowdrop blossoms that I had missed the morning’s

darkness, now held in the arms of the first sun,

and I know, here is spring, rising, warm and full,

from the bottom of winter.

The next morning, I wake

to the silence of snow blanketing

the woods, the frozen pond, the roof,

and I know a little

of what I do not know

of the bottom of winter

*Anna Linzer is an American Book Award-winning novelist and poet. For her entire life, she has lived along the Salish Sea in the state of Washington. She is of Norwegian-Lenape heritage who lived on the Suquamish Port Madison Indian Reservation and Shaw IsLand in the rainforest along the Hoh River. Her novel Ghost Dancing (Picador/St.Martin’s Press) received an American Book Award in 1999. Her novels Blind Vigil, Dancing on Water and A River Story were produced as the handbound, limited-edition Home Waters by fine-arts publisher Marquand Books.