Winter
  By Kathleen Johnson

Corelli’s Christmas Concerto, chocolate and oranges in a sunny chair,
red scent of cinnamon, colors chasing like children
through December air. A new year promised to open, open
as a stained-glass window might open, if it could, a passage to salvation.
Then the year turned, and so did he. The future fell silent, a diamond
ring into snow.
He left and took the colors with him. Even my dog’s white fur felt cold.
Raw winds whipped and moaned. Nothing to do but try to hold on.
It was the time of violet shadows. Violet, color of the end of the known
and beginning of the unknown. A twilight world. I could’ve wandered
into a picture on my wall, say Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow,
followed those lean dogs of winter wherever they might lead. Anything
but the gray procession of days and dread, endless walks down gravel
roads.
Where is your God now? Hope is a hard, hard stone.
January’s moon rises, a broken piece of milky quartz. Opaque. Cold.