Poetry Review Special Feature: "Season" by Steven Mayoff

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present "Season" by Steven Mayoff.  Mr. Mayoff was born and raised in Montreal and now resides in rural Prince Edward Island.  His story collection, Fatted Calf Blues, won a Prince Edward Island Book Award.  His first novel, Our Lady Of Steerage, will be published in early 2015.  He is currently working on his first poetry collection, Red Planet Postcards, as well as a libretto for an opera with a Greenlandic composer.

Season

Steven Mayoff

An encasement

of ice over bark and bud

light spinning silvery

branches, bowing under the weight 

of chandelier glitter

these crystal splinters a culmination

of a thousand past winters.

At the first sign of thaw

curious fingers prod the exoskeletal

crack – revealing a tapering of wet

green appendage.

A brittle cackling even as icicles weep.

Curious fingers peel away

whole casings of hibernating sleep.

Dead armor melts, washing

away brown needles and old stingers

down a snaking stream into

the breaking river of an aching dream

a loose awakening of mysterious ways.

Poet’s Notes:  I live on twenty-two acres of wooded land beside a river.  The first winter that I experienced an ice storm in this rural setting, I was fascinated by the visual wonder of trees encased in ice.  This seemed to be a physical manifestation of the isolation I was feeling, the beauty and the loneliness of it.  I called the poem “Season,” because this seemed to be a kind of interim season entirely:  a season of despair and awe somewhere between winter and spring.

Editor's Note:  I love the ethereal mood and gentle rhythm of this piece as well as the sing-song assonance on the sound "ay" in the second half of it.  "Season" was first published in Cerulean Rain in January 2008.