Winter Journal: Scratchings among the Burnings

clouds in rafts above, upon one another, pushed up along the margin of sky dark underbellies Shirring of grasses and the nearly empty apple tree behind Where is this beginning from? The roll of clouds bolsters up close moves vaguely east Hear the interstate, its rush of backdrop constant Oh those deep colors are something sacred There are patches of olive green, chartreuse, umber, piled against each other, snapping and smoking almost and then the empty prongs and systems cross-hatchings against the grays, burnished and glowing The cloud roll has changed now, been buffeted slowly into bunches, disorganizing Oh, these torches before me that seem to burn brighter as the light fades This aching gradation, smear and gleam-forth and then the bare black hands up through splaying and forcing the crowns so slightly, just a tender worrying up from inside the swollen gloves, the spheres of them, the undoing the serial falling-off Furious brocade, yes, devastation That one oak in its torque and above, against the maddening subtle surface of the sky the barely defined roads upon it, the passages the growings-forth gobbed and wrought, rich impasto stubborn, unbecoming Now the grays, almost purple, seem to move forward branching up from out of the background darkening forth surge from within the mass organisms coming up against each other, bulging and turning off, roiling slow and mesmeric the contained motion of it rooted static movement, within stasis painstaking damage then recovery, damage then recovery A lighter band of sky now, stratum between dark cloud and complicated span of tree-frieze layering, up-changing free-needled, built-up duns and copperings score and rose-green gore, stitch and fret always upon the under-thing, the broad backing up over the one