Birds fall off branches, dead to the cold,
all over the known world. That part
of me that exists between the eyes,
looks out through its coated lens:
what offers itself back is winter;
the fiery cold and the blanket-white.
Snow has fallen overnight,
wonder on the microscopic level
‘No two flakes alike’, so the manuals say,
The ones on how to get on
The ones on how liberal to be
The ones on how to treat the murder.
Snow stirs the small boy in me,
the bitter days, not felt as a child
of the worst snow in a hundred years,
breaking the back of Parliament Hill
legs locked around a wooden sledge,
hitting the halfway hidden ledge
and sailing out over space–the pond
later fished, frozen mirror to the leap.