Winter Journal: Gray Shadings

Barely discerned clouds Hard, hard to get here what worth, what worth River of steel. River of no one becoming you. Trees that are emptier today, more forced in their forms To focus on them is to be made glad of them in their strangeness The earth extrudes through them toward emptiness The few elms dismembering The willow’s bloom above shore like a curtaining To focus on it is to be mostly taken into its tapes and its filters It is lost to the surface of this river The dull, impenetrable, intractable surface resisting, unetchable Now the faint rain. I don’t know what to do with all this waiting things getting themselves readied toward emptiness The scratchy, shattering elm, its crimped skin, its exfoliating, its rivening its being disfigured by fortune and by wind A crone with old frills at her hair The grasp of her toward me