You remembered June when this morning's sun
was there with the care of a father's hand
etching each leaf into filigree--
or with the unsequestered heart of a crazed lover
with his impossible love letters and artifacts
of century's old over-ripened fruits
that even as they hung precariously from the oaks
dazzled and made space for the stark blue.

A change from last night.
The constellate, dispersing fog
that brought the sense
of an overwhelming descent to a seabed,
the submersion a baffling return to a night
from childhood, enclosed at all ends
and unknowable. A shut book.

2.

Warmth lingers on skin even after
a few minutes of exposure, a caress.
Then, step outdoors and the wind,
whose listlessness and beauty
picks up your step and hurries you on
with characteristic mercilessness
through the cold.

While you were sleeping and roaming and reading
it has crept into the uninhabited crevices,
under doors, fuseboxes, the shades of streetlights
to mold like frost.

3.

Cold is a life-form,
growing and budding in the absence of green.

And it is at this time of year we strangle
the neck of uncertainty.

The sun peeks. The cold air climbs
out of the bottoms and hollows of things.

When it reaches an excitement, as now,
her absence reveals herself:
there is nowhere you can touch her body.

She is the thousand particles
she is the spacing in between:

twirling, gathering and thrusting through the streets,
she calls you to witness her now as she comes
like a first snow.