Ship of Winter

"Through fortuity, at the crisis of errant skies,
you reunite the lives of the sea to that of fire,
grey lurching of the ship of winter
to the form that love carved in the guitar."
– Neruda, from "March Days Return with Their Covert Light"







Hours by January Shores


Wait by the hour at the shores of winter
and the thousand gods of light, no longer in favor,
might disappoint and the fresh gleaming
of natural fractals do retreat and the mind knows it.
Deepen the cold, light or not, but bald
shore that had once left the thin waters
where only the guppies swam and jumped
to scratch the skin of the lake, the stream,
this great and grand serpent of river, like a dream
now has thickened a skin and sits there
as a moon, white, cratered, believable,
my own eye's replacement for three months' life.
To come to love the ice is a sight scanned
from within, as thought soothes the amygdala,
as the pathways that search, themselves rivers,
form new and pulsing oxbows of synapses,
turns the hardened quarters of back coves
again to the bright slivers of a whitened eye.