Everywhere the ice,
And the singing of the last starling on the rotting phone wire
Echoing vibrant over the crusted field
Even to the rough-shoveled dust holding the last of our kind
Long given over to silence.

And so the starling sings in sonatas strange and wild,
Each an anthem ancient in remembrance of desire and loss.
Each a punctuated coda; a siren plea to the gathering dark,
Each a hymn to one last, desolate longing.

Having practiced quite forever, his kind’s warm welcome of forever,
The starling knows and sweetly greets what we will have forgot:
A dawn without us, and summers, autumns; time without us, ever and ever
Until the last star-laced singer, in mid-song, falls,
silent into ice.

You take a warm autumn’s morning with trepidation;
Fall, as we know, is a fooler, a flame-dressed trickster
Whose promises are those of a lover false, given over
To desire’s fire-filled days and night’s cooling passions.
This then, is autumn’s promise: Love is a fool’s full moon,
remembering is a flame leaf lost on winter’s wind.

I found five weasels in a wood,
Five grey kits so fierce they stood,
in challenge on the timbered trail,
my urgings all to no avail.
They held their ground as if to say
This darkling path on which I stray
Is weasel-wood, a tracking ground
Where silent death waits all around
And, transgressing here I truly fear
So ends my trekking here this year.

At a stirring in the orchard, she sharply turns.
monument-still she watches, lopes on.
Her mottled grey more coyote-like than *****,
The fiery orange long gone from her wasted frame,
Her once-bushed tail, now hairless, drooping.

An aged ***** in her last winter, moved to stalk
in daylight, up the orchard to the treeline,
Once the hill's best hunter; each year her kits
ferocious players near the now dry brook,
Does she dream, I wonder, of those springs?

Leave her now to time, deep-denned,
where the last sleep's call ends hunger,
hid from the season's creeping chill.
Better there to finish than a trapper's snare,
Better this quiet ending in the *****'s lair.