Frozen River II
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Winter Matches
I.
Walking Home Through a Whiteout
Many crippled angels attend me here,
hovering on all sides. My breath,
the same color as this storm, floats
through their snow-filled wimples,
swirls their gauzy pantaloons. Coming
in and out of existence through floods
of icy fog, they regard me, holding
their muslin canopies over my head,
reciting prayers of blindness.
In my vertigo, I posit these angels now,
not as beings, but as fictions of time
creating the framework of a necessary place.
A christ with white eyes
just touched my lips, blessing
by his cold, boneless fingers,
my faltering way.
II.
These Know Nothing of the Word Winter
They can never speak of winds blowing
down from the Arctic, or wooly frost
in the nostrils of steamy ponies, or a dark,
early dusk descending, ominous as a lone crow,
into the stark branches of a sycamore.
Yet they are the very ones who draw their stems
slowly and beautifully into the collapsing
white umbrellas of themselves, who change
their multiple sun-faces easily to icy porcelain,
who fold the frozen rivers of their hands calmly,
as if they possessed a prayer.
They know so well how to become
all the powers of their own annihilation.
Tell us your names. Teach us your talents.
III.
Spring Messianic in a Winter Storm
Beyond the rims and crevices
and stopped ledges of frigid
rock, beyond boles and black
burrows closed and corked
by snows and zeros, past omens
of grey sedges pressed beneath
battering dusts of ice--what was it
I saw in that distance, barely there
against the high, vast bleakages
of weather, a mere suggestion
of vision fluctuating before
the falling over, the white loss
of the plains?
What was it? nothing the eye
could truly catch--one blue leap
of match in the icy wind, one faltering
crimson flume of spark under snow,
a false igniting, a mis-struck
flare, a rip of hurried flag,
a failed signal.
Only much later in my sleep,
does the sound of it finally arrive,
coming as a brief turn of stringed
waltz in a smattering of unstrung
chords, a partial measure of polka
plunked on an ancient Pianola, one simmer
of jazzy cymbal, one redhot blare
of brass wavering off-key, fading,
snuffed out, vanished, as missing
from midnight as the dawn.
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