Songs of Waiting for Winter

I. These Are Sparse and Windy Times

These are sparse and windy times
Troubles lurch asphalt, gutter, curb
Wounded weary horsemen bending
Sucking water I used to withdraw
From a well no longer recognized
As mine

I’ve patched these jeans, sang wispy
Wintery themes, loved her wrongly
And she died on a windowsill, her skin
Like dust swept away, delicate bones, hands finger
Diaphanous and shining strings of blue afternoon,
Flushing the pheasants curled in grasses blackening
The sky, their rise heralding an evensong
My piano used to know

These are amber and gracious times
Won’t the metal in the crankshaft
Slurp the oil and run hot wire round
Soul machinery, hum and sparkle, roar
And rattling up the railroad leaping
Bloodstream fire spitting across
The face of withering criticism, sailing
O’er your fields of flowers anymore?

Burlap bag in a searing wind
Indigo-dusted butterflies, voices
Of autumnal repose soften
Curl and dry and lose their scent
Like rosemary left burning in a pan.

II. Emblems

Remember
The grieving leather, the edge of sorrow
Unsheathed and slicing thin gray cinders,
A whirl of dust curling,
Blown with abandon, wheezing ambition
Embodying in breathless moments airy emblems
Signs to shuffle a soul on through, and on you go
Enduring windless valleys and sterile, crumbling
Peaks moonlighting as tender dreams long unfinished

And unyielding to sinking limestone scrapings
Abandoned—by you? Ignored—
This remember is your passion played
The heating blood of letters and emails turning
Like milk sour in the fridge
Cool balm of remorse and yet
Flung to ether and lodged in files and waiting
Humming for resurrection in soft glare

You the audience, you the player, you
The drinking dogged fawning critic fingering
Ointment dip and puff and smear
Along the mirror’s fault lines, desire
Pray, whisper, remember
And still growing established
Once
You were inside, you saw and spoke
And the reflection, suspended, held.