Marble Hero

"....But, as with a marble hero,
one's eye rolls up rather than runs in winter..."
    –Brodsky, from "Eclogue IV, Winter"










                                                       iv

Up Miller Bluff, a faux forest, suburban,
as anywhere you look, up to false horizon,
there stood the trademark white vast walls
of four-story houses built to see all seasons;
the trail had become nothing but rivulets
melting, undecided snow through a winter net;

I'd just as soon bed down here in the limestone;
trees bare, homeless to all but a shadow stand
of what was, but the rocks are never alone
and once you take the clothing off the forest
it's vertebrae of ridge spine you know, ancient
dreams set under our microscopic DNA.