Winter Storm
She woke to white fields and a screen of snow
so thick she could barely see the shed.
He had left early. There was another place
to go to once night fell. Tree to tree, a red
cardinal stitched the white air.
The garden that had worked her hands
all spring and summer lay buried. She felt sad
this morning, looking out on so much land
that held nothing. She would always wake
with a cold place beside her in the bed.
He would always return to the house in town
for the children's sake. She had read
the winter storm was coming. She was prepared
to wait it out. The distance between, a backroads
route, would go unplowed for days. She stared
at the dwarf maple, bent low by its heavy load.
The white-roofed feeder swung in the wind
like a ghost’s lantern. She told herself it was good
enough that he wanted her. Before he left,
he had chopped and brought in wood.
Jane Ellen Glasser's poetry has appeared in numerous journals,
such as Hudson Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Georgia
Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her poems have
garnered numerous awards from the Irene Leache Society, Puddingstone, and the Poetry
Society of Virginia, and she has been recognized for outstanding articles on
teaching poetry that were featured in Virginia English Bulletin and English Journal. In the past she
reviewed poetry books for the Virginian-Pilot, edited poetry for the
Ghent Quarterly and Lady Jane's Miscellany, and co-founded the nonprofit arts
organization and journal New Virginia Review. A first collection of
her poetry, Naming the Darkness, with an introduction by W. D. Snodgrass,
was issued by Road Publishers in 1991. She won the Tampa Review Prize for
Poetry 2005, and her award-winning book, Light Persists, published by Tampa
University Press in April 2006, received an honorable mention in the 2007
Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Her chapbook, On the Corner of
Yesterday, was recently released by Pudding House Publications.
