Mother Dream with Summer and Winter

Children’s seashore voices tumbling with surf,
long-tailed kites high above the strand, bodies tanned           
gone home for napping, tucked inside white cotton beds.                 

I went out walking, left the road,
in need of traveling without knowing where to go,
so around snowed-over baseball field, stopping halfway

home to pull off boots and socks, wiggle toes, thrust bare
feet through the slick ice crust, a plunge into soft confectionary
snow below—the radiating nerve splits a victorious, shocked

brilliance—then a helicopter flew over, its shell-like underside
exactly like a moon crab’s articulated abdomen,
and it sent down a line for me.

*

Leslie Williams is the author of two books, most recently Even the Dark, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Image, The Southern Review and elsewhere. She has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Robert Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She lives near Boston.