Winter, actual 
and in its frozen music 
contrapuntal, 
creaking and wheezing 
cracking and groaning, 
in the far north 
of Lapps, Kylfings, Inuit, Yuraks, 
absurdly long, 
coercively cold, 
tiresome, fearsome 
even for polar bears 
in winter’s depths 
slowly, slowly, half-awake 
moving, hunting 
on the jagged uneven 
sheets of ice. 

Even for us here 
in the Adirondacks 
in a bare cabin in winter 
north enough to force us 
to snuggle up together 
even when we don’t want to, 
don’t feel the need 
for another body, 
beloved or not, 
next to us. 

Forgotten, our paradisical 
pegs and clefts 
that hook us together, 
blazon like a thick carpet 
to receive another’s overgrowth 
or open folds to a relentless Priapus. 

Is it just winter’s cold 
that takes it all away, 
fades desire to an uneasy shadow? 
Lying in this factitious 
frozen dignity, 
a remove forced on us, 
we fail to see 
that there’s more than 
cold at play here, 
that even in summer’s heat 
legions of us must be feeling 
the same discomfort, our reluctance 
to get close, 
knowing it could last longer 
than the ardor of the act, 
the touch of another’s flesh 
oppressive, excessive, 
could last to the cooling morrow; 
down, down, down, 
nolens volens, to despair, to rage 
at this insidious rebellion 
against our will’s purpose to love. 

Bereft, bereft 
until nothing’s left but the memory 
still overshadowing; 
the romantic smell of a rose 
recalled from long ago. 

Locked in the present 
lovers no more, no less 
than before 
we lie like strangers; 
a stronger ghost still holding us 
in its loving tireless embrace. 

Jack D. Harvey’s

poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, The Comstock Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal, Scrivener, Typishly Literary Magazine, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and over the years has been published in a few anthologies. The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Two Poems (“The Perspective of Venice” and “The Dogmeat General”) by Jack D. Harvey in Poetry: Issue 97, July 2025 at The Write Launch

⚡ Guernica at the Prado, ekphrastic poem by Harvey in Bewildering Stories (Issue 840, January 2020)

⚡ Three Poems by Jack D. Harvey (“Cetacean”; “Quem Quaeritis”; and “Ode to Olivia”) in The Ramingo’s Porch (30 July 2019)