Winter Verses
A sky running in neutral,
tuned to static by the crackling trees;
a cold sun imitates a second moon.
Within the winter’s vanishings, come
reappearances: familiar patterns of branches,
the abandoned bird’s nest, years old;
Thin ice forming again on the lake,
as though only to oblige the warning signs
that have been left up since last winter,
as though the purpose of its freezing,
were to surrender meaning into those signs:
the year’s end pulling them back into context;
a love between the thing itself and those things
that refer to it; synchronicity: how time arranges itself,
twice daily, to prove the truth in a stopped clock,
or how two people, moving at differing speeds
around the wheel’s circumference, might just catch each other;
cast their names, like leaves, into another season.
I am listening to those old songs again:
You, pulling the lyrics back into their orbits, filling
all my hard-earned answers with your questions.
