White Bird In Snow

White Bird In Snow

This unsleeping night

remembers winter for me

as it remembers the January hour

I was born, seeing past the still

green curl of April's exhausted leaf

the chill glassful of north wind,

so delicately sipped now

before the drowning.

It knows my name, it calls me

winter girl, drifted witch, 

snow-woman globed from rolled

frozen fog, compressed cloud wrack,
sentinel-eyed and carrot-beaked,
ice fingers melted then
rigid again around

a hollow pen;

bent wrist, bent back, ages

old, so old not even an ash-furred coal

glows from the parsed fire in my pale

flattened face.

The sleepless night

rustles with husks and remains;

a coyote stutters his hunger 

to the planked stars

and here where all things pass,

long sleep comes down the grass
where I wait

invisible and surprised

as a white bird

in October snow.

~October/November 2016

for Brendan at real toads 

from a still, white place

 






Images: House in Snow, 1890-94, by John Henry Twatcham
White Birds in Snow, by Ohara Koson
Public domain.