Winter Rain to Spring Showers

They call me the Ice Queen, she said
proudly,
as if coldness were a well-honed skill,
an epithet of respect.

But I knew better,
baptized in a hillbilly elegy.
I thought I saw survival
in how one might close up shop.

We were different,
I discovered painfully.

She played the victim,
preemptive detachment and blame
rather than risking
vulnerability, courage, intimacy.

A fool for love,
I sat next to her in cold rain,
deceived
about how dry she was.

That time,
I sat through the weather.
Wrangled a second time by another,
I was faster on the draw.

Oh, beloved, dear, friend—
where are you going?
No, you shall not ascend
into my refuge.

I don’t think so, Chimera.

Through metamorphosis,
or maybe a long walk back home,
I found my True.

Now I reach for her hand,
and find one already reaching,
like a pillow in the night.

Cherishing our gifts
without coveting the other,
loving as love is without wishing
for more or less.

We walk together through the wilderness,
neither pulling nor following,
each step directly before us.

We slip into our redwood cocoon
and sleep soundly,
her on my chest,
breathing out the world,
inspiring each other.

Every breath is safe to breathe,
every step is safe to walk,
every word is safe to speak.

Now I experience symmetry
beyond a white dogwood flower:
this refuge we enter together.

Once, winter rain.
Now, spring showers
and spreading blooms.

Now verdant,
from the fertile soil,
overturned last season.

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Post Script

This poem began with a memory of someone who spoke of being called the “Ice Queen” as though emotional coldness were an accomplishment. I understood the impulse to close oneself against pain. I had learned versions of that survival in my own life. What I did not yet understand was the difference between protecting a wounded interior and using detachment, blame, or victimhood to avoid the vulnerability of intimacy.

To sit beside someone in her rain is an act of love. It means accepting discomfort rather than leaving another person alone in difficult weather. The painful discovery comes when the rain is not truly being shared—when one person remains sheltered while the other becomes soaked by a suffering he believed they were enduring together.

The names in the poem mark stages of recognition. The Ice Queen is a cultivated identity. Chimera is the relationship as illusion: something desired and believed in, yet assembled from projections that cannot sustain a shared life. True is intentionally less definite. It may be true love, a truer way of living, or the self that becomes visible when love no longer requires diminishment or disguise.

The reaching hands offer the clearest expression of reciprocity. I do not reach across an empty distance and hope to be accepted. I encounter another hand already moving toward mine. We can walk without one person pulling and the other following. We can rest together, breathe freely, and speak without carefully reducing ourselves.

Symmetry does not mean sameness, nor does it require every gesture to be measured and returned. It is the felt balance of two people who are both willing to approach, reveal, support, and be changed. More than symmetry, it becomes a shared refuge—one that neither person invades and neither person must defend alone.

Winter rain and spring showers are made of the same water. What changes is the season, the surrounding warmth, and what the rain allows to grow.

Image credit: Pink Dogwood at Augusta National Golf Club (2015), Ryan Schreiber, licensed under CC BY 2.0.