The hip old mill of the disco
stops grinding the wind into power.
A soft nothingness descends
like a million moths filtering
through cobwebs and cobwebs of moonlight,
leaving the anesthetized eyesight bobbing
like duo lanterns on local boats.
In the gray allegiance of pre-dawn,
an inventory of tackle, nets, and floats
is visible now the night is gone.
Then the pill of the sun is thrown
and the titration point is behind us,
irretrievably clarifying things.
Darkness is exchanged for daylight
in a parenthesis of clouds white as snow,
as the trackless frost on a winter’s pane
that once seemed a window on the timeless.
Oh eternal brevity of twilight,
winged hiatus between Then and Now, between
our minds and the brute stone wall of our senses.

(for Dr. Zhivago)

THE SNOW KEPT THE WORLD AWAY
and she held me as gently as sand holds sand.
We moved like shadows moving toward eclipse.
This woman opened her long-silenced lips,
and Noise that had built a fortress in my land
was hushed away, and I was still as lapses
of consciousness at the threshold of a nap.

THE SNOW PROTECTED US
Holding her was a tingling in my nerves.
She knocked gently at my courthouse heart
and penetrated even to the government.
Holding her was the wilderness of wharves
in winter when the sailors all report:
I skipped my ship, now I’m the government.

BUT THE SNOW MELTED
for I could not look perfectly at her,
and we both knew that we must die someday
as the fox dies hunted away from its mate;
for love is like the snowflake stars that whir
around the corner of winter’s galaxy
and then’re gone for good, I tell it to you straight.
Once winter leaves, the snow melts at a rapid rate.