a snowflake broke half of its
fall on the shoulder of his coat,
the other half splintered off to
the bare ground, like fractured
stories of his happy ending,
he stood ice-veiled in the snow,
fingers released the blooms over
her grave, Marlboro cigarette lit
all reasoning and nostalgia into
grief,
his mind's eyes moved over the
etching of her name wrung in
powder where the pendent dusk
conspired with the perturbation
of ghosts,
I am living, a trickle of verse fell
the length of his mouth to the
miles of unfavorable weather set
in, weaving madness in this air-
less space of colorless prison-
house,
beneath his snow-drenched boots,
the earth pitched of blood whose
arms threw out semaphore of the
dead, tensed and static, he turned
with alien feet toward a living dark,
struck mute by the stinks of loss—
One day the earth will bury me, then leave whispers of nostalgia among the sere of clay. My arms will reach
for the wildly grown flowers above the grave whose sepals went unplucked;
my ears will pursue
the sounds of a great white sail from the past winter's rain, when the beads of fog draped half the sky.
I will become a nub of bone
staring up the skin of sleep, while my dwelling stirs and tears like radiating mildew.
As if the passages from life into oblivion were through the cache of a thousand spits and groans inside darkness,
I will pull mushroom from the hillside, nudge apart the pile of shale with crawling beetles
on its back. But for now, I am lying down
next to the earth and petting its midnight ear, where the loam swallows me in its vast miles.
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