With morning chores behind me,
I have no desire to turn from winter’s
ghostly arrival, watching the moth-
soft flakes lessen the harsh contours
of the earth and accentuate the ruby
splatter suspended in mid-air like dense
clusters of buckshot, though the mind’s
eye seeks to apply the drizzle of color
across the landscape, say, upon the
lower field’s vast canvas of monochrome,
such that the flailing bark of a paper
birch might become a discarded scarf
or a cardinal might emerge from a plume
of snow lifted from a whiskered branch
while icicles transform into diminishing
flames where our footprints will later
stitch together a winter day’s odd marriage
of pallid light and shadow and where
the delicate hands of upward-yearning
trees will pull down their bridal-white
garments amidst a murder of raucous crows.