Re-placement

The gold, the fog, the frost of you
cloaked me in bliss
even as the fans spun.

Our gaze was enough
to forget the dearth of time
lying about monotonously.

Locked between our eyes
leopards and tigers thundered
through recondite jungles.

Down steeper slopes
their snowy brethren crept
among the boulders,
radiant with Himalayan sun.

In its buttered glow
suddenly I placed you
in bright knit and mittens

gliding past the mills and ice banks
in dazzling velocity
even as you stared so tall
in the earth hues of travel.

An old century tugged at my blood:
in a wholesome Lieden attic,
on a moonlit night crackling stiff
with icicles and bold bare trees,

we crouched,
children under the rafters.
Your boyhood smell of glue and wool clung to me
as the canal’s hard gleam conjured enchantments.

Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist (Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), freelance journalist, essayist, and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Deronda Review, The Comstock Review, The Mystic Blue Review, The Big Windows Review, Indefinite Space, The Plum Tree Tavern, Literary Yard, Clementine Unbound, Anti Heroine Chic, DASH, and The Dawn Treader. Her collection The Strange Travels of Svinhilde Wilson was published by Adelaide Books in 2020.