Weekly Poem: ‘The Winter’s Wife’

By Jennifer Chang

It will be years before I understand
failure. The sun’s last rage
in the winter trees. My yard
is a failure of field. It is small
and poorly tended. Years before
this hard kernel of worry
rises to a truer height, I can learn
to make shade with my palms,
but I cannot learn to unmoor my want.
I want wild roots to prosper
an invention of blooms, each unknown
to every wise gardener. If I could be
a color. If I could be a question
of tender regard. I know crabgrass
and thistle. I know one algorithm:
it has nothing to do with repetition
or rhythm. It is the route from number
to number (less to more, more
to less), a map drawn by proof
not faith. Unlike twilight, I do not
conclude with darkness. I conclude.

Jennifer Chang is the author of “The History of Anonymity” (Georgia, 2008). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry and A Public Space. A Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Virginia, she co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the support and promotion of Asian American poetry. She is writing a second book of poems titled “Some Say the Lark.”