First Snow

There’s music in the first snow
Like the foam of Seas, it’s ethereal
Letters of rock and water to Woman
To Man, a sub-music of the blue
Skies and clouds and seas

It’s the gulls of the cosmic rain
Variations on what winter means
The death of ease, the struggle for comfort
Unless in darkness, you find yourself?
We stepped over icicles of white

We felt it in our breath, sang our songs
It is cold to be forever young
And inside we are still so young
Sun-bleached are we not, we remember
The feel of winter on our laps

A humidity in the back of our throats
The jaded hope that this too will pass
It’s a faith of nature’s cycles that’s for sure
There’s music in the first snow
And release, release from so many things.

Facing Snow Courageously

 

I face the snow headfirst

With eyes like diamonds

For winter, I will grieve

 

In my own way, hearing

The battle cry of many

New ghosts, I will whimper

As the wind howls

And I will do a rapid

 

Snow dance at low dusk

And the stove will remain red

And my heart will hear

 

The news broken like

An empty book ready

For the calligraphy of

Hibernation, retreat, reclusiveness

The clouds of disorder

 

Of this strange world

Will not trouble me anymore

I can appreciate the whirlwind

 

Of snow ragged among

The tops of trees, and that is

Enough, tea is optional

Nature is unforgettable

The ladies seek comforts

 

But the snow only requires

A landing place, to accumulate

The white magic of another time.

City Without a Name of Winter

Watching the crowds in their dark jackets
I can tell that winter is on its way
There are no grey laurels left
We just wait for first snow
It will seem beautiful then, novel

As it traces our footsteps
In a frothy whiteness of magical grafts
Marrying concrete with the skies
You will have parts of the world
Unmelted by sunrise, just a snow-covered

Precipice of cold, we endure this
With a voluntary patrol of visible breath
Under my breast and belly I feel grateful
To have a woman at my fire
It’s the pulse of the earth I miss the most

In those harsh winter months
The smiles and small laughter of spring
It’s a city without a name that freezes
So many people more sad without the sun
I can tell that winter is on her way again

Like minerals that forget to sound their last trumpet
My blood will not freeze, I will walk on.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Winter-139159678

A Breath in Snow

As I walk up the rise into the silence of snow
I bear witness to transparent snowflakes
The bright falling breaths of our shallow lives

The paper tissues that dabs the dips of fate
The snow is deaf and blue and white
It licks the oxygen from the brittle ground

Swishing your lips is your remedy
For that whistle in your hollow chest
Our body is a blanket of snow for winter

Our body has been all the seasons
Of water, stuttering down the miles
The swollen river of all nestled and snapping things

I suck air back into the spanking sea-breeze
Of the twisted motionless spitting paths of winter
A sky flipped open for our shared afternoons
With no scratchings, only the rustling of an emptied hope.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/snow-75022732

Dragonfly Debts

After the battle, of many lonely years
The solitary times no longer worry,
It’s only grief and a slow dying
Facing snow, I know the color is white

A dirty walking road of dusk and clouds
There is too little light this far north
But I am old, I am finally old –
Too many places, communications are broken
*
Family is scattered, but I cannot read
My books of grief, there are too many poems
That sound the same, too many days
Each piece of spring it will return

I cannot grieve forever, my moving eyes
Return to important things, the beauty
Lost in my studies of the world, one must
Still seek joy, the greater good, across
*
The passing honors, I will reveal flying blossoms
Pollen in the wind, lost faith returns
I am drunk in the debts I have made
Nature’s drops of water, dragonflies

So little time to know each other
We should not part, happiness and I
Bliss with unusual you, I watch butterflies
Go deeper and deeper into a field of flowers.

Photography Credit: http://browse.deviantart.com/art/Dragonfly-187356316