Women in Cities in Winter

Again with the long walk, clicking down High and onto Broad and over to 4th and so on. And all the pretty ladies bundled up with the delicate heels peeking out from long coats and swaddled, stuffed-animal bodies. And the drabness--nothing that isn't grey or beige unless it insists: those reds, yellows, oranges, a few twinkly Christmas lights, downtown strung in electric sparkle, a big red velvet bow but largely sidewalk-colors, cement and pavement and a sky sucked dry of any blueness.
It exhilerates A who imagines a man in love with a woman who has left him and that man goes to her hometown and walks miles of it, covers every street on its grid by foot and begins again, only to know her city and somehow figure out just what it was that made her his for a minute and then so gone. A entertains herself with melodrama, that man eating soup in the window wants to leave his dying brother's side and hop on a train with nothing but a duffel bag full of books and black licorice crow candies. He wants to park in the dining car, drink bourbon or maybe scotch and test the pillowy dark of the licorice against his teeth.

I just mean that it feels like winter break here and I love it. SO much solitude, my days spent writing or in the study researching or reading. I make tea, do laundry, plan the next soup and bread I will make. I take long walks to work and to my little new meeting and I wear sweaters warm and red like the red dreams of being on its best most saturated day. What is wistful seems understood by the starkness of the landscape and what deep kisses might blow one's ears out or blow the better part of a year away seem part of some other season. Right now is so precisely itself that I am nearly in a state of bliss. Even yesterday's meeting was fun, my elfish L-Bo full of spritely sparks and tons of amazing writing (you Go, L-Bo!) and the faculty at my school is quirky and strange and fun. (How weird is that?) And the walk home was so cold but again, as if to crystallize things and it did and it does. I know why I'm here and that's a rare, welcome feeling.

P.S. In unrelated news (save that EKW blurbed Ms. Jengles) when this happened I had been keeping my distance a bit and didn't get to but always meant to cheer.

What Tin House said about Revolutionary Poet is right, watch this star rise and rise. His poems are not only beautiful, they also truly matter. Unlike many of Wilson's contemporaries, his poems are larger than "the speaker's" sense of himself or his very important angst or whimsy. He's razor-shop but full of heart.