But I should never think of spring - Lili Raynaud

after Hoagy Carmichael and Jane Brown Thompson

I am still trying to make peace with winter. 

this month feels like a familiar room where all the furniture has been slightly rearranged.

I am older and more irritable.  

there’s the occasional walk around the block,

in which I find a new pasta shop next to the Frank O’Hara plaque I somehow never noticed.

the basketball court in Tompkins Square Park is still frozen over from last week’s snow. 

sometimes on Saturday morning I board the White Plains-bound Metro-North. 

the train rides are like little pockets of… something.

semicolons in between time-stamped sentences. 

what other sentence do we have but time passing, really?

through the window of the train, the winter seems more beautiful here. stretches of barren trees and headstones under the melting, still-white snow– a dream of East Coast suburbia. 

do the branches get growing pains too, I wonder. 

then home late again, wishing, not wishing. NPR in the morning and Chet Baker at night. to think my breaking heart could kid the moon. to think!