In winter days toward twilight
Supper looming and the long call
Of parental care avoided
Like spoonfuls of castor oil
We’d set off on grand adventures
Down the alleyways
Championed by dogs, evaded by cats,
Amid the fine scent of burning garbage
Hunting urban treasures:
Radio parts, discarded syringes,
A cache of vacuum tubes,
Ground glass whiskey tops,
And once, an entire television
Bereft of its fine cabinet,
Emptied of all diversion,
And cast forlornly, contemptuously, aside.
Unbidden, it comes all the same
Without malice, unaware and uninterested
In our dreams or desires
Without even innocence
Its promise of sweet seclusion
Sequestered beneath the pale sameness
Dissolving in the salty mired streets
White and gray in a death spiral
A love embrace unlike any
Seen since the last snowfall
What may be, what could be
Belong to the feckless air
Oh, I can dream, all right
But only until recalled
By bickering gulls
Geese barking orders,
Or the shrill outrage of the
Woodpecker’s call
A field mouse trips nervously
Across an ice dam
Vultures patrol the freeway
Food from top to bottom
Interested only in replication
The slaughter of millions
But a byproduct of procreation
So long as enough survive to breed
Or not, and even then,
Some beast waits anxiously in the wings
For just enough change
Just enough opportunity
And still, falls the snow.
I
Daybreak
Orion long since fled,
The new moon cradles the old,
With Venus, that old voyeuse,
Standing watch,
All the sky ablush
II
Temperatures drop slowly
From the unblue, steel-gray sky,
The promise of snow revoked
In response to some
Imagined slight.
Across the low-slung day,
Footprints.
III
Finally, snow,
Fierce and bitter
No longer willing or able
To hold its rage against
The lingering autumn,
At the tress clinging absurdly
To their dead.
IV
A Sahara of snow,
Windblown and duney,
Bereft only of camels,
Piled like so much longing,
Like so many
Cancelled appointments.
As green withers and falls
It’s good to recall those other seasons
So sprung from desolation
Beneath the last and desperate snow
A boon of tenderness
Determined to catch light in its beams
Lifted itself in ignorant jubilation
Here and there, all unaware
Of its own irrelevant and unfailing
Death
All unaware, in its motishness
That such small impertinence
Begins the crack
Of winter’s back
That such improbable spiraling doom
Begets a new and ancient season
Again and again and again
In the deep and undisturbed
Rhythm of the universe
The gray sky matches perfectly
The weathered tarmac
A sense of time already gone
Cars straddle gutters
The shuttered faces of the crowd
Loom in procession
Each bearing the meaning
Of the spiraled helix
A mirror of destiny
Of inevitable withering
Still, there is that window box
With the last petunias
Of the season
exiles child 