Two Poems By Mike Reis

A Neighborhood Walk in February

In winter’s ice-edged heel solstitial light
Foretells a snowfall sniffed before it’s felt.
A barn owl’s perch seems near Orion’s Belt.
Suburban foxes bark to still grief’s fright.

Her fluent saunter calms the season’s bite
Like skaters glide on slim liquescent melt.
Her lissome stride expresses what’s been dealt
Need not congeal to austere glacial night. 

By alpenglow that limns this twilight sprint,
She opens trails through bleak hibernal frost. 
In supple sign, by dint of limber hint, 
Her insight blazes culs-de-sac we cross.
From cuttings’ cold frames, subtleties of tint,
She teaches found betokens nothing lost.

Hopkins

Waking to hope after matins he hums two new plainsongs to occupy his time,
Thinks of writing Bridges to criticize the rhyme,
Then stops, live in his tracks, knowing sure as Christ comes
How choristers reckon to chant the sublime
But rework of soul never sums.

Growing up in Baltimore, Mike Reis is a poet, environmental historian, hiker, essayist, and inveterate beachcomber living now in Silver Spring, Maryland. With his fiancee, he enjoys dancing to blues rock. He has had poems published in Gargoyle, Lucille, Urthkin, The Archer, Laughing Bear, Unicorn, WXPN Express, the Amelia poetry postcard series, Cabin Fever (the anthology of the Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series), and North of Oxford (forthcoming).