Young Woman in Solitude

She imagines pine branches tonight
on this mountain in Southern Vermont
as crossed sabers protecting her.

Leaning in the open doorway
of her parent’s summer house,
she blows on a mug of herbal tea.

Ochre lamplight tarnishes the deck;
her shadow’s seized by the monumental
night. She hums to herself, a poem

she remembers a college roommate
used to sing to a tinny guitar:
May you find rest on a soft girlfriend’s breast…

Living alone this Autumn, she seeks
a single idea, cold and crystalline, that best
defines her life, that she can own.

She expects it will take time to clarify, 
like one of those color photographs
that develop slowly in the hand.

Earlier, disarranging dark clothing
and heirlooms in deep closets and cedar chests,
she looked for that one pure thing

from childhood: a bright sari
her mother brought home from a trip to India.
A moth, warmed by the woodstove, escapes

from its shabby cocoon, blunders out
through the crack in the door and disappears
among the first snowflakes of the season.