Altissimo Snow

Well today there was no easiness of winter.  Just ask my muscles after shoveling for several hours to still not make it out to go to work.  Too much snow.

But oh well:  here is another poem.


Icy Branches

Icy  branches break off
and catch in the hair of my head.
Reaching my numbed fingers up
to grap the cold wood dyed
in colors of night and rest,
I pull the stem gently
from its nest of hair and drop
it to the ground,
like a child with a newly
purchased pet fish
and a glass globe,
my fish a branch,
my globe full of fallen
brush and decayed
undergrowth. I shiver
delicate snowflakes
and sigh as the woody chip
joins the forest floor in a song
of the easiness of winter.

A New Poem

Sometimes late at night,
even as the cat slumbers
at my feet, I lie awake
struggling to remember
the exact color of Robert's eyes.  
Were they the color of the pebbles
we collected at the shore summer
before last or more like the antique
linen we bought that time in Montreal?
My brain tries the colors in the void
of his eye sockets in the unfinished
picture I hold up to the light in my mind.  
I think I have discovered the color
but realize that it is gone like the working
knowledge of calculus that in my younger
days came easy as the cat’s slumber.  
What other memories have I lost
like the cat beginning to shed her winter
coat on a warm April day? Can I dare to sleep
for fear of a synapse searing and releasing
yet another memory that will lie on the carpet
until picked up and throw away like the balls of matted hair.

Message Received

Message Received

Two thoughts snap in his
mind as he picks his
way through the field,
large and  full in late
summer. It is night.
The grass touches his ears,
nose and he sneezes. Lost
in the darkness, his  
progress along the wall of
foliage, dense as the night, stops.
Moonlight enters
his eyes, wide and big as
an owl. Fireflies, not one
or even two, but a group
just right in number on this night,
in this field, flick  to each
other, to him. What are you doing
here, he asks. They twinkle an answer,
translated by the reeds.
The two thoughts return to him,
seeping into his mind with the
message of the tiny lights.
I'm alone, was one, the other,
how dark it seems. He turns
and runs into the grass.