The Four Seasons

* In the shape of a submarine frost lengthens on a window. Outside, winter sparrows perch in rhinoceros-colored trees. Mare's tails chase whitely past brick chimneys. I have seen those lights before, small rectangular eyes of far buildings, one church steeple darkening the blue sky. * It looks like a stopped grey heart, if hearts sport such delicate scallops and trees wear hearts on their sleeves. Now the first wasp of spring emerges, its wings a transparency of fish scales, old isinglass or vein-fretted windows— wings of the first untranscendent angel sentenced to death by the god frost. How can some later spring reclaim this paper city or repair its walls damaged in the long drop from the one hundred and twentieth odd year of a tree? * The sky wears that color through which you expect a tornado's black drill. Only cicadas try the air, a scratching that cannon could not silence. Beyond the barn with three siloes and the wind pump stopped like a tin daisy, carp lip the surface of reflected sky, the promised violence. * I always imagined that place as an orchard on a mountaintop, its summer Delicious freckling to a sunset by Seurat. But the last time it was fall, the sere grass bent one way toward an open gate, as though a great wind had swept down stones of the garden walls. Two posts bent where the orchard had been, their purpose obscure. They stood, I think, where flowers had rivaled deepest in their colors and scents.