This disconnect from the grey and cold
Of a winter’s breadth
Enough, I deem, to let me stumble bold
Pink and wrapped in baby fat
Romantic lines fit to caress.
Call this the poet’s regression: that
Urge to beautify the same alloy
Dismantle the hearth, the laying of brick
Warmly, as the walls of Troy;
Like the end of Homer’s sum
My fate in poems like that of Illium.
Spectres of the warmed men
Haunt the open air
Adopted aspects in a long-since ken
A half-toothy smile
A finesse made manifest
In the yard of Elegy’s rose.
Written in their stony vines
A chronicle of the lovely evergone
Dates and names, the last image
So manicured, so plastic,
So subject to temperament.
What real flowers can spring in rheum
I put and sob for them, time steals
As the robbers will in their tomb
Where knowledge walks beside
Hope runs on ahead.
My weapon was anxiety
Completed fear of loss
Slated but loved dossier
Or pretense of the fiery.
I cannot be certain, but that deeds conclude
Behind the curtain of the heat, fonts
On cobble, I brood with chills
Of those winter months.
Before me a new yard, rolling green
Opens for, piecemeal,
The bloodless thing called Beauty,
Quite ill equipped for my touch.