December Dusk by Anne Britting Oleson

She wipes her breath from the window.
Outside the birches are ghosts
raising their spindly arms;
pale against the dying day,
they wail against the coming of winter.
She draws the ring from her left hand
and peers through it, as through a telescope,
the wrong way, making
the world smaller, tighter.
The sky bleeds into a night
which stirs with the cry
of a lost soul. Bone marrow
feels the oncoming freeze.
She bends stiffly and places
the ring in the ashes on the hearth.
Tonight there will be snow.

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