By Ice Purified

February, the cauterized month,
Stems the old year’s bleeding.

Drag-marks in the snow:
The wings of birds’ or angels’
Feverish searching…

Beginning is for later;
Time has ended.

For the dead past, to remember it,
Some stain the earth.
Grim epitaphs, flushed and livid,
Too many schemes, too many ploys,
Rub against each other
And the dirty gravel roads
Jostle the skyline.

Breathe

I breathe in.

Air, transpires,
From its place in hollows and in rooms,
Fills my emptiness.

It enters me, invisible.

Out, I breathe, part of me,
An exchange as secret
As each breath before it.

It lasts a lifetime,
Repetitious, subliminal breathing,
Capturing the unseen, releasing it
Never knowing if hollow or room
Was its first and only home.

Lain Here for Mercy

Accumulating like memory,
Drifted snow by the hedgebank
A filtering smirr of ice in the air
Whose wide spiral to ground
Makes trackless white
Flat to the woodland edge.

In shelter, under the trees canopy
Snowfall will not enter the dimness;
Silence closes in.
Only a few flakes drop now,
Lazy in the glim light.

Birches’ white stems, stark pillars in the shade,
Hold up the roof of darkness
Over the brown leaves’ carpet, still brown.
Winter flecks lie cold upon it.

Long Train Running

The long hour goes 

Like a slow train running. 

Another sky’s static weather

Dips leaden behind the trees,

Hangs ragged pannus

Where rain may yet fall.

And the slow train

Endlessly becoming

Blurs the immediate landscape.

The arriving hour remains,

A pinhead in the future,

So minutely exact,

So irrelevantly indistinct.

Leaning

Men with time on their hearts
Hands in the till of time
Stealing a vicarious future
For the best of motives.

The same city in my dreams,
The same rooftops bear me dreaming
Over the streetscapes.
Even now, when the years have gone lightly
Into the useless calendar of history,
These night-time thoroughfares echo still.