Four Poems from Dead Winter

∇

My task, my cross — to reassemble

winter’s memory? Each fingernail, each checker

on my shirt, each knot of knits, each follicle,

and every cone? — Doors shut at my enquiry,

forgetting of when was it we first met.

Why ask for closure, when there’s nothing final?

The BBS is down. Cursive’s untaught . . .

Yet I taste the iron in the walnut.

Because I read so little and so slowly,

turns bend now only to who I was again,

appear as habit. Widely believed to have

writ adverse advice for adulterers,

I scour notebook prose for hidden meters,

my flaws dressed up as inconsequent failure,

crime camouflaged in error. Tell me now

the course, poor navigator, to the shore.

∇

Winter’s prison: fog, the titles I write down to read,

each night too short to write that letter you would rather

I not write. Here useless struggle’s worth my while, I cleave

persistent loafing, desperate inertia. To sing

without a tune, figuratively abstract: the sound

product of tying my shoes. Now, when I’m pulsed to change

a word, I often leave it, not — my suspicious friend —

for love of it as is, but of serious boredom,

so that you too may feel that drag, and this hang, also.

​

∇

In a disjunctive age, disconsolate, without connection,

I lick this postage stamp — a thing that you may not have ever licked.

Pulp paper trails the color of cracked walnut shells and cork boards.

To write this is to stay up till tomorrow cannot be a day

to read about the dead, tear further troubles to have later

seams to mend, put forth exhaustion from which to recover, tame

rhetoric in its wide, trembling circus tent. Word for word for word

I change to pass through night in pace with night, time as if bravely

lost, but lost, lost all the same. There’s no decision left to make

for those who feared deciding — once, twice, a third, until it was too late;

choice narrows down the lane, in time the brooks and soldiers run away

from tinny villanelles. Even your name, your status update —

divorced, vacating job, collecting dust, disheartened, now deceased

— means little if at all a thing it is to be. Compared to what?

Compared to winter’s day? The heat of these laughable plastic keys?

∇

To have a book to read and not

to read it. Smoke out a window

at the rain — someone to talk to

but not to talk with them. Silence

but for plastic keys struck softly.

No bell for waking, nor for sleep;

tolling the eights on chestnut desk.

Who will continue here once roads

are open after winter’s close?

Published in Dead Winter (Fonograf Editions, 2022).