Winter Journal: Disseminate Birds over Water

The reservoir churned and cloud-deformed The far line of hills, fused, bunched color bitter wind against this hunch my folded bones I can see the rust earth beneath trees, the rough mats gathering weight in semi-darkness, dim nesting bases of trees Graft of dark cloud upon lighter one behind, building up of something, a thickening, deposit of cold air, dark web of insistence, built up in me How long can it be here? A simmering of trees, a dark moiling a winter weight a mid-shimmering of heat-distorted things The positioning of bolts of deep orange, gold-green and amber molded, wicked in together Drops in pressure, now, a field of cold, a shift between rain and snow The movement into this remembering of separate things, train sounding its horn, removing itself from the scene Snow thickening the far bars of trees, graying them in Blotting, dulling, gauzing over this dream It is snowfalling, it is beauty-filling and cleansing this burn of words it is delivering something seeming to uplift and to begin pressing downward, this ink into frozen droplet this thing Snow plinking in the leaves, the left hands of trees the neat levers and pulls the odd weeds The rich fringe of emptying trees the shifted pins the breaks into dense pines into period reeds into gutterings What happens to the opposite shore is untenable is unmanageable to me That stratagem of damage, that unmattering Believe me it is some abomination of things being killed and that mattering to me That exquisite built thing that is obliterated its tiny white amplitude, its singing crushed into particles, its must on the undersides of leaves Now I am sure the world has not unfolded before me anymore but has closed into rows of its foldings Something in the collections of those trees bare branches upthrust, the brush of them bare branches up-brushed their lip along mesh of shore weeds, the flanged grasses the scrim of their midst I am in them again meddling in darks that are in them and the white gold that is their outermost screen that is their leafleting their grief that is in me thin dredge of pebbles and strange glandular patternings of trees against trees against cut-bank against breath The rubied lung of sumac tragedian