Jeanne Svensson

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There Is a Door

There is a door into this poem. I walk through,
inside are spruce trees,
small, snow-covered beneath their towering elders.
Last night it stormed, I watched
how snow erased our efforts from the lawn.
In the morning I saw
your hair, dusted grey above its dark sleep cap,
face left soft behind while you journeyed alone,
hands reaching across the sheets
as if for a memory, which reminded me
I barely look in that direction anymore.
I touched you to bring you back.
We ate, went out to walk, I said
there is a door in, a mystery
and though I've known you
longer than I've known anyone, 
I can't always open it.
Some half-mile out I turned toward the trees,
there were tracks, 
but I didn’t follow them.
Inside the poem there's so much freedom,
spruce rooted like dark secrets
in the frost of arrested being.
Stepping outside after breakfast, we found
our blueberry bush flat against the lawn,
bent under snow that clung, frozen,
on the net we'd put up to protect it.
All my life has been shaped
by such small ironies.
In the poem there is no past 
until I write it.

Jeanne Svensson is an American writer living in Sweden who, after many years’ hesitation, has decided her work is not her own. Having risen from a place of mystery in a manner largely beyond her control, she feels it belongs to the world that inspired it. Her poems/flash have appeared in Zig Zag Lit Mag, Apollo’s Lyre, A Fly in Amber, and Tiny Wren Lit.