Mission Viejo Authors & Artists
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.