The waterways are frozen:
It is war. No butter. Rations bitter.
Always & forever winter.

Climb spire
Branches of fever:
field-mice in the church like stones are dormant
Gravestones' shoulders are frozen, sloping.

Steep earth low ceiling:
Rowing with Anne cabin-fever hothouse
roses scarlet climbing rib-cage after radiation.
Oars over torn water slip back into oarlocks put paid to healing.

Before company, lay in a stock of linen:
Polish window panes
Put shelf-liners in.
Dust mirrors until they're lakes.

Water obeys love's laws or none.

White & lime.

I've been up since forever before the rooster in his red aplomb.

*

In my dream, a nameless, orphaned army doctor
narrated Requiem in the language of my ancestors, Russian.

Winter's day is traversed slowly
Wound in fragile ice
Every step exhilaration & suffering.

Here are a few berries for your hand
Now sing in Russian!
(It's said that wicked people have no songs.)

Our pain threshold
Is pushed up by sun like molten lava
Then Lowers with nightfall:
We have touched bottom.

*

At midnight pain sinks thru earth.

Ponds become mirrors
reflecting lace-like ice.

O my lasting sonority
Today your very cheekbones shine
Brushed by snow feathers in coracle of wind.

Death has a way of ironing loss in like linen.

Torchlight Leaving Canvas

takes the face back in a Rembrandt van Rijn
plunging features in chiaroscuro
subtracting smile expression in those sea-gray eyes.

Tars smudging
Tears of beggars
all the bodies maimed
in building the great bridges of the world
collapse
sink back into the ocean:
O to bury a boy in a box
a girl in a stone.