birthday lunch on a snowy day

Christine Valentine

licking the last

cappuccino mousse

from my spoon

I gaze beyond

plastic covered windows

and regard through

this distorted viewpoint

dead vines on the picket fence

in the gray landscape

truck tires

slurry in the snow

slide into the point

where roads diverge

in the house

across the street

blue light shows

the old folks

ready to watch

as the world turns

my coffee cup

chinks

against the saucer

with finality

I pull my collar closer

walk into the wintry landscape

of my sixtieth year

Christine Valentine came to Montana from England in 1964. She worked for the Northern Cheyenne Tribe for 25 years and is married with four grown step-children. She writes poetry and non-fiction and is published in many anthologies including Voicings From the High Country, Hard Ground: Writing the Rockies III & IV, Foreign Ground: Traveler's Tales, Blessed Pests of the Beloved West, Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West and The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. She is Editor for the WyoPoets' Newsletter.

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