Not a bird. Not a tweet or a twiddle. Barn swallows,
bluebirds, western tanagers, probably gone south,
chickadees living on their stash of seeds, huddled
with their friends, fluffed, or in the case of the pileated
woodpecker, in their carved-out tree caves, invisible,
all. This is what the snow tells me: the senses
are always craving, fastidiously revising, burning through
arbitrary places and names. I look at what I scribbled down—
the ragged edges of my dreams.
“FIVE MOONS. NO, BOMBS,”
and now it comes back to me, how some dream person
said, “Look, there are five moons!” and there were,
until they began to whiten and bulge and I saw
they were bombs falling gently as snowflakes,
and I retain that feeling of knowing
the world’s almost over, that in a few minutes all
will be white, and I remember feeling protective
of those few minutes, registering as fully as I could,
no matter if there’d be no one to tell. Still,
the crystal-like whiteness deserved remarking,
and such revision as was possible in the meantime.