Winter Solstice 2021
by Nate Maxson
March 2022
after Frederick Seidel
A painting of a White Russian general on a horse, wounded and leading his cloaked and shivering troops on a march over the Siberian ice in a column behind him
It sat on a wall in the art gallery where I worked for a summer, no one bought it but sometimes a potential customer would stop and stare for a moment before moving on to the more palatable sunsets and western landscapes
One considers, such things in time
Like nursery rhymes
I like bathing when it’s raining, on Christmas Eve
With a German novel to read before the water cools
Remember how it used to snow
Every year
Like clockwork
I want to live
Inside
The moment
I want to disappear
Into the fog that recedes upon approach,
To swallow my vanishing
Like a coin, a coded message
I can’t let them find me
Late to my own séance again
All the days in retreat
Northwards, the birth of another man’s child or god
We’ll split the difference
I like bathing when it’s raining
In the summer
I like dreaming
In the water
I am a plane that disappeared over the ocean
Schrodinger’s private jet
Either it crashed or it transcended
Why not both
I want to disappear
I want to live
Why not both
Deja vu or quantum entanglement
My long retreat across the empty places where it used to snow
All the days
In escape
Inside the storm
Where it’s warmest
When I was small enough, young enough
To fit my whole body in the bathtub
I would hold my head
Underwater
For a minute
I didn’t know
These are the quiet hours
Dawnlight
Twilight
Before the war
Returns
This will not save the world
When the plane you’re on
Experiences turbulence
Don’t you think about it
Someday
I’ll be a field of yellow scrub grass
The boot prints of men who fled across me
Already flattening out
Fading with the daylight
Nate Maxson is a writer, performance artist, and the author of several collections of poetry. His latest, Maps to the Vanishing, is out fall 2022 from Finishing Line Press. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.