The Lost Stations

Snow thistles the water's surface, then vanishes, like the flaxen stars. The flakes fall into our palms so we can hold this fugitive light. // My father hiked early, the fog crumbling into the hills of sumac and ash. His stride wide as an elk's antlers, his hair flying upward, light and unsnarled, as he trekked over ribs of ferns imprinted on the forest floor, the path like the hide of some autumnal creature basking in the last of the ochre light. // After the leaf flames from red to rust, then what? You can never prepare for the first snowfall — how innocently it begins, how its bright heft gathers force, leaves you bereft, as seasons live and die by water's absent-minded presence. // I don't believe in windchill, my father would say, despite winter's stern counsel. My brother and I shoveled the driveway, burrowing like mice into scarves, stiff with ice. After, he would explain windchill was how cold you felt, not how cold it was. But what of love's equation? How to weigh what lives under the skin, the distillate of moments — like the memory of sun — too bright for explanation. What I finally felt when I held my own children, the white clay still smeared on their bodies.

Because the skylight brimmed Because the moon seemed to inhabit this room Because I could not speak your way to the open window The next morning I had to gather your cramped legs — that mess of pink yarn bound by spidersilk & ants — in my palm & watch that inner snow fall behind the glasswork of your eyes Last night you were a prism thickening into gleam a tiny turbine of white flame & precise silences whose wings could singe wind whose beak was a rapier whose forked tongue like a king tide muscled toward nectar Now the forest grows inside you & your eyes are milky as sea-stones I tried to be merciful balancing your quivering body on a frond but your beak tipped forward into the green throat of the bush I dipped my clumsy fingers in & dug you out your last screech a rosary of pleas Around us the trees shivered silver as your breath became fainter the lack of you like the thin honour of violets growing over a grave: I wanted you to feel less I wanted to feel less & when you were gone I felt less But not in the way I wanted.

Where winter's last pewter resides, a griefbody flails its sleeves. Brute sky a church's hushed ruin. Evening's dull bruise on snowdrifts. Everything in a spirit of undress along the streets' blanched seams — all this diminishing. Spring's melt can never repair the rough work of time. The eye is a gathering storm, adrift in the cache of memory. The spirit, a glum garment searching the snow for omens, if only to wield a compass, a way back to the molluscs' milky mantles, to the dew-minted bracken. To the dew-minted bracken, to the molluscs' milky mantles — if only to wield a compass, a way back. Searching the snow for omens, the spirit is a glum garment adrift in the cache of memory; the eye, a gathering storm. The rough work of time spring's melt can never repair — all this diminishing along the streets' blanched seams. Everything in a spirit of undress: evening's dull bruise on snowdrifts, brute sky a church's hushed ruin. A griefbody flails its sleeves, where winter's last pewter resides.