On nights like this I would play my cello, the snow like tinfoil under a phosphorescent moon. Before I knew it, you were there, with your handkerchiefs and your melancholia. The light on my windowpane, a struck match all aglow. We would take turns cradling the instrument’s long neck, its cavernous belly, watching the cold metal strings shiver and hum. After each chord you’d swallow glittering nerve tablets, whispering: Be still. Be. Still. Its sonorous voice faded with each blue pill. And when the snow eddied and slushed, the cello safe in its towering white box, I took up sainthood to pass the time. On winter mornings my teeth still ache.
Kristina Marie Darling, USA
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Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University, where she received both an undergraduate degree in English and a master's degree in American Culture Studies. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVox Books, 2008). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear in such journals as Gargoyle, Miller's Pond, Illya's Honey, Big City Lit, and Janus Head: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Recent criticism has also been published in issues of The Boston Review, Modern Language Studies, New Letters, The Colorado Review, Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review, and other periodicals. Additional awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Centrum Foundation, and the Prairie Center of the Arts, as well as scholarships to attend the Squaw Valley Writers Conference and the Ropewalk Writers Retreat.
A sensuous poem lacking any hint of clique, and with tantalizing themes of silver and resonant sensitive strings. I like how the tempo changes. The period marks work like a conductor's baton carefully orchestrating a most memorable aria.
This haunting piece is like the sound of cello music.
What is it about the first snow that makes us turn to poetry? I love it.
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