Stanza

Because in medieval Italian it meant “room” I tied the curtains at their elbows with what could have been honor cords or worse yet, a belt from the 60s, so hideous were the tassels that were dancing a little tarantella after I had propped the windows and the wind had carried in the song the rubbing trees were making, without any accompaniment, mind you, from a tambourine, although the bells of   the occasional sleigh played that part, while I waited for the vixen and their shameless yelping to follow the music and the cold and the night inside where I sat half man, half snow, to investigate my squeaking pencil and the flapping of the bird-white page I couldn’t seem to catch in those years when I lugged around a frozen heart and was infatuated with whiteness, since I had read somewhere it was the absence of color, which could not be true since I had once loved a pure white duck with a white bill and feet and I had even torn its white flesh with my teeth that were still then white, which should have been all the proof anyone needed to debunk our outdated theories of absence.