Winter Journal: Threshed Blue, Cardings, Dim Tonsils

stripped batting of cloud glimpsed ligaments dusk coming up under lithographic, nib-hatchings instruments click the fine-sprung locust replicate dinge along hill-lines tailings of umber, the rust smudge There is still that hemmed ocean of oaks the various reds, the somehow silver cast over the brown-gold the under-brushed shadows How can there be more of their dispensing into air? The night-openings of the trees The thousand clefts into Their corridors shiver and merge and piece apart There is no one beside what was once river Only the carbons incoming accreting in leaves Love of old oaks unencumbering Root-beauties brought through crude sieves of bare trees the few fastened leaves Those pods are like tongues or like sickles The blades have been pulled from their sheaths The backs of the clouds now upturned They herd from pink seas They make their untouchable stream through regions of steep emptiness against which the trees have their gestures Drop down, drop down toward me your little sleek scars Make your bed in rough cedars clangor of darks numbering in clusters of trunks and spoked lungs the thistles that work at the gums