It's Tom's birthday today, and this is what he'll be eating tonight.

Antipasto: sourdough bread, olive oil, salt, dill beans, pickled peppers 

Slices of smoked pork shoulder, with a sauce of tomato, cannellini beans, and garlic, arranged over a square of Yorkshire pudding 

A salad of pears, arugula, and toasted walnuts 

Clementine gelee with Cointreau-flavored whipped cream and butter cookies

Dog in Winter

Dawn Potter

Up the boggy headland, frozen now, where a stone fence

Submerged in snow and earth-sink hints at pasture

So long vanished that the woods are convinced

Grassland never existed, two bodies climb—one fast,

Black, doe-agile; one slogging and foot-bound

Like a superannuated tortoise.  Guess which is me.

Easy to badmouth my grace but oddly hard to expound

On the postcard beauties of our workaday scenery—

Giant pines draped with frosting, wisp of chimney cloud

Threading skyward, and behind the frosted window

A glorious wall of books, lamp-lit; a dear bowed head.

In tales, common enchantment always merits less than woe,

            And perhaps I should collapse on the stoop like a starved Jane Eyre,

            Pleading heat and mercy. But I earn my joy. I mean, I live here.

[reprinted most recently in Favorites from the First Fifteen Years, an Autorean anthology (Encircle Publications, 2012) and forthcoming in Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]