Editor's Note: We asked and you answered ... more than a dozen stories and poems about Los Gatos have been shared with us on our Los Gatos Jubilee Facebook page, or at the end of posts on this site for publication beginning Aug. 10, 2012, in honor of the town's quasquicentennial celebration. This is the eighth submission written by Los Gatos Poet Laureate Parthenia Hicks, paying homage to the town we all love so much on We're joining the Museums of Los Gatos StoryShare project and sharing with them your contributions here.
Around Midnight Winter in Los Gatos
The winter inside slips out
in small ways like deer,
whispering into town around midnight
under the frosted moon,
hooves clicking on ice crystals.
Everything that was offered so easily
in the blood-gorging thickness of summer,
pulls back, shrinks into cold,
snaps into frigid, as windows close.
The herons edge across Vasona
as the sun shuts itself down,
earlier and earlier, and
three thousand miles away,
blue crabs hunker down
in the shallow grassbeds
of the Chesapeake Bay,
soft-shelled carapace buried in mud.
Winter hunts for the heart
lulls it to sleep, calls it into rest
patches it up in the shortest and darkest hours.
