Beside the pond in late November,
I’m alone again
as apples drop in chilly woods
and crows pull tendons like new rubber
from a road-kill mass.
Ice begins to knit along the ground,
a bandage on the summer’s wounds.
I touch the plait
of straw and leaf-mold, lingering to smell
the sweet cold crust.
An early moon is lost
in sheer reflection,
wandering, aloof and thinly clad,
its eye a squint of expectation.
And I know that way,
this looking for a place to land
where nothing gives,
these boundaries of frost and bone.