From the Fishouse

Now it snows without sticking, the invisible
air given a ghost's body by motes
fleet as the fireflies' sexual isotopes
igniting the meadow with little half-lives,

but colder. A starling flock, disrupted,
ascends and circles twice in loose
precision, high enough to seem the very

negative of snow: emphatic, demanding,
warm-blooded, though their bones
are hollow and their bivalve hearts
lighter than a sanded clam shell

or the whitest pearl.
Winter's revenant
invites you into it, and there you lie
while the bleached sheet, accumulating,
translates you to an angel in a solitary bed.

Beat your wings to leave your signature,
sole mark on the virgin manuscript.
Or, still now, the figure weeping on a tomb.

What are you hiding from, in a body of snow?

A touch and it melts on your finger.

Because this is not your element, even if
you learn to lie in it, unblinking, and watch it
falling from a bloodless sky,

faster now, faster, till all the field is white.