Thomas Festa

Overwintering

We never learned what took her. The family is private like that. Even among their closest friends, no one knew she was ill till the end. Her husband still can’t bring himself to talk about it. He’s photographed famous artists, presidents, and movie stars for glossy magazines, so the candid snaps of her he posts on social media speak his grief for him. 

torn umbrella
the scent of baby's breath
unbearable

Their kids are still young enough to veer from tearful hugs to games of hide-and-seek among her mourners. Off in a quiet corner of the gathering sit the teenage twins whose jovial, well-liked father left no note last spring. One’s hunched over in a hooded cloak, a pair of wide, watchful eyes staring out from the shadows.

            marsh sedges—
         snaking through snowdrifts
         a brook’s dark why

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Thomas Festa is a professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, and the author of a chapbook of poems, Earthen (Finishing Line Press). Other work includes an ecopoetic reading of W.S. Merwin’s late poetry (in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) and poems in Bennington Review, Drifting Sands Haibun, and Haiku Journal.

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