What a thing to trust your life to, a scenic
veneer of solid safety, slashed with blades.
Give me four cubes in a gin and tonic.
Give me salt for sidewalks and lacquered roads.
In London, 1867, the ice
gave way in Regent’s Park, and hundreds fell
into the faithless lake. In a trice
Victorian coats and heavy skirts swelled
with water; boots and skates pulled them down.
They clawed at branches, each other, the frozen shelf,
mad to regain the land. Forty drowned.
So cold it was, the ice resealed itself
and kept them for days, preserved like florists’ wares
under glass, reaching toward the air.

There’s Baxter, our neighbor’s harmless little dog,
before a storm door window, contented as a cat.
We’re in a row house and share a front area. One day
this summer we were headed out just as our neighbor
and his pet were coming back from a pee jaunt. Much barking
before our neighbor calmly said,
“Let them live, Baxter.”

And there’s our maple, now in winter
stark as any other tree, when only months ago
it tried to dominate the block with color
and, as far as I’m concerned, succeeded.

Now let’s bring in snow
there on limbs and branches, speaking up
as streetlights come on. Does that do
the trick? The idea is for the poem
to be as good as a pot- au- feu, where, to my taste,
after all those cuts of meat, plus marrow bones,
plus vegetables pulled from the earth,
the trick is done by cloves.

If in the blue gloom of early morning,
the sky heavy with portents of snowfall,
the air crisp with the cold that will
gather about us for the long season ahead,
you see the slick blackness of my car
humming in the empty A lot; and if you
see the light of the dash against
my face, and notice my mouth moving 
like a sputtering madman’s might,
and if you see me wave a hand
toward my head and pull away
the knit tam I wear close to the skull,
and if you see me rocking, eyes
closed—then do not second guess
yourself—it is true, I have been
transported into the net of naked
trees, above it all, and my soul
is crying out the deep confusion
of gospel—the wet swelling in my chest
is the longing in me, and these tears
are the language of the unspeakable,

When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts the snow
The lower chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
‘Come out! Come out!’—
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,—
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether ’tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided.

When winter-time grows weary, I lift my eyes on high
And see the black trees standing, stripped clear against the sky;

They stand there very silent, with the cold flushed sky behind,
The little twigs flare beautiful and restful and kind;

Clear-cut and certain they rise, with summer past,
For all that trees can ever learn they know now, at last;

Slim and black and wonderful, with all unrest gone by,
The stripped tree-boughs comfort me, drawn clear against the sky.

There were still songbirds then
nesting in hackberry trees
and a butterfly named Question.

I remember ivy trembling
at the vanishing point of your throat.

Then the timelines crashed.
California split into an archipelago.
Orchards withered under blooms of ash.

Now there is no nectar. No rotten fruit.
The air is quiet.

                               Once, in Russia,
Ornithologists trapped
a population of hooded crows,
transported them 500 miles
westward. Winter came.
They never caught up with their flock.

With crusts of calcified algae
we catalogue each day lost:
hot thermals, cirrus vaults,
fistfuls of warblers hurtling into dark.

There was no sound to the forgetting.
We knew the heart would implode
before the breath and lungs collapsed.

That the world would end in snow,
an old woman walking alone,
empty birdcage strapped to her back.

Ice petals on the trees.
The peppery black sparrows pour across
the frozen lawn.
The wind waits patiently behind the barn.

Though I’m not myself here, that’s okay.
I’ve lost my name,
my last address, the problem
that has kept me up all night this week in winter.

Such a long time coming,
this white timeless time in time,
with zero to the bone
the best thing anyone could ever say.

I stand here in the open,
full of straw, loose-limbed, unmuffled.
No one’s here, not-me as well,
this winter morning that goes on forever.

^{after Reagan Lothes}

Because nothing else is on so early
in the morning when he drinks coffee
in an empty house. Because almanacs

are of limited use compared to satellites.
Because spring will have to come somehow
and cold reminds him which bones

he’s broken. Because every flight delayed
or canceled is one he won’t be on. Because
people should stay where they’re from,

except his children, who were right to leave. 
Because a flood will take what it can
and move uphill. Because just once

he’d like to see a tornado touch down
in an empty field and go away
hungry. Because his wife nearly died

on an icy road. Because he can’t prepare
for disasters he doesn’t understand.
Because wind keeps him awake. Because

his boots are by the door, but his slicker
is in his truck. Because he can’t change
a damn thing forecast and uncertainty aches

like a tired muscle, an unhealed wound.

Two days of snow, then ice
and the deer peer from the ragged curtain of trees.

Hunger wills them, hunger
pulls them to the compass of light

spilling from the farmyard pole.
They dip their heads, hold

forked hooves
above snow, turn furred ears

to scoop from the wind
the sounds of hounds, or men.

They lap at a sprinkling of grain,
pull timid mouthfuls from a stray bale.

The smallest is lame, with a leg
healed at angles, and a fused knob

where a joint once bent.
It picks, stiff, skidding its sickening limb

across the ice's dark platter.
Their fear is thick as they break a trail

to the center of their predator's range.
To know the winter

is to ginger forth from a bed in the pines,
to search for a scant meal

gleaned from the carelessness
of a killer.

In Milwaukee it is snowing

on the golden statue 

of the 1970s television star

whose television house

was in Milwaukee 

and also on the Comet Cafe

and on the white museum 

the famous Spanish architect 

built with a glass 

elevator through it

and a room with a button

that when you press it

makes two wings

on the sides of the building 

more quickly than you might 

imagine mechanically 

rise like a clumsy

thoughtful bird 

thinking now

I am at last ready 

over the lake

that has many moods

to fly but it will not

and people ask

who are we who see 

so much evil and try 

to stop it and fail 

and know we are no longer 

for no reason worrying 

the terrible governors 

are evil or maybe 

just mistaken and nothing 

can stop them not even 

the workers who keep 

working even when 

it snows on their heads

and on the bridge 

that keeps our cars 

above the water 

for an hour 

in northern California 

today it snowed 

and something

happened people 

turned their beautiful 

sparkling angry faces up

A mist appalls the windshield.
So I still see trees as moral lessons,
as I pass under them, shadowy and astute.

The glazed aspen branches hover.
Ice heats up and cracks, road tar steams
like some animal where the blush

of cheek is chilled by annunciation.
I cannot say her face was trauma driven.
I'm still saturated with her, taking in

her etched-in countenance, otherworldly,
enveloping, frightening, the face you can't see,
pressed against it. So how can you imagine

what it feels like? Their gravity suffices,
the sealed and straining torsos
of aspens, an affront to our high-pitched moans,

feverish with disarray. Our expressions
have too much God in them, too much cloud, too much
blood on nail, too much arrow, too much quiver.

Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my window:
                                  Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
                                  And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.

Heavy snowfall in a year gone past
hammered the sudden edge
of the house foundations
to a rounder world
a whiter light after the end of day.
My favorite coat, lush sable
in color, a petty fake
that warmed me to the ears
hangs after the seasons
a beaten animal grinning buttons.
It became quite real to me
and now is matted on a hook.
How far away what mattered
has flourished without me,
along the tasty road in the wood:

clark, clark, the hidden birds call
or do wrong, do wrong, someone
do wrong, snapping apples
from out in the woodside, telling
their fathers names, pie cannonrude
barkwithfist brendanbe with cherries.

It is a vast field
where snow will fall again.
Is the vast field ownership
or a presence of mind?

While they are young
the old provide
the moon gets full and looks down judging
not the maze of anger
but the fury
at the wasted years,
at the waste of the tender snow.
Wasted, wasted, the birds crackle,
wasted on you.