In this week’s poem, Gregg Palmer invites us into the sinuous darkness of a stream running through winter ice. I love this poem’s vivid, hypnotic, nearly mythic imagery of contrasts — the stream’s blackness against the snow; its rush through so much stillness.

Palmer is a public educator and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he is learning the medium of poetry after years of fiction writing. He was born in Maine and has lived most of his life here, currently residing in Portland.

Winter Stream

By Gregg Palmer

Black, silk ribbon unfurling through bone-white

Forest, birches casting shadows across the haggard

Hoarfrost advancing down the banks where darkness, itself,

Hurries past, pressing up against the integument of ice that pulses

It pulses and below, hovering over the pebbled bed a trout, motionless,

Sickle moon reflected above, pinned against the inky empyrean, one bend

Then another and another wending away this forgotten prayer, a winter stream

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Winter Stream,” copyright © 2023 by Gregg Palmer, appears by permission of the author.