From the Archives: “How Like a Winter” by Kelli Russell Agodon

How Like a Winter

She spent the days of December reading
Shakespeare’s sonnets. Sleepy icicles dripped

from her eyelashes, but she kept reading.
Her family decorated the tree

while she sat in the leather chair reading,
opening Vendler’s book when ideas failed.

She wore a discolored sweatshirt that read
Shakespeare’s Muse, carried a Mont Blanc pen

behind her ear. You could see her reading
in midnight mass near the back of the church.

While the believers knelt and prayed, she read
and worried about forgetting to shop.

The city was Christmas ghosts, lights of red.
She was buried in the snow of sonnets.

(You can learn more about the work of Kelli Russell Agodon at her web site.)