Waiting for Snow

Half a window with its night;
an angle;
a tumult;
a beach and its glass
abandoned in moon;

A Scandinavian grind
of college nights
leaned against
library glass.

The decades —
what they wait for,
what they mean —

and what the
window murmurs
with its night,
its open doors moving,
years moving over.

Sing for me a loss —
a half-night;
that street-lit porch;

those belly-full clouds
and that sea
and all that shines upon it.

At the end of the world
come the spires of pines
and the stars between:

Everything opened
in one great moment
I once knew.

I put on my boots
and took them off again.

I moved from
the house
toward the tracks
in the night.

I heard that old voice

Promising, promising,
promising.

And I was afraid.

A Dream of Windows Where There Are None

All my remaining days are

frames absent
posts;
small years
gasping
Easter without fire
over
thresholds
hushed
behind the choir loft.

I am
unembarrassed,
poured over
church lawns;

long shadows
of last bridges.

I am
a last people;

a dreamt language
of exhausted pictographs
pounded
into
brass
and cornhusk

where my children sleep,

become.

what locks go unlocked

All those buried axles
and the road become trail,
become rumor
near slag heaps
and ruined moons,
and the ways forward.

What locks go unlocked
fill up the firelight,
and the ingratitude
of passage
circles three times
in the tall grass
and settles too close
to the old encampments.

In the middle of the night
the treetops and the smokestacks
pivot against starshine;

it's all backward,

the face of the compass spinning
beneath the needle.