Snow Burial
       

Snow falls through the radio, and the news is mostly white,

          cars disfigured, statues blind.
          Wind casts a linen over the mirror

of our street, and when I wake,
I wake alone.

          When I hear a whisper
          down the chimneys of the eastern seaboard,

it feels a little late.
The bells of these homes on ropes of smoke,

          whomever they toll,
          they toll in silence.

          I wanted to write you a letter, you,

I say, as if.
I wanted a word in the shape of an hourglass

          the blizzard fills,
          suspends, and dismantles,

the morning I awaken, into grains.
Snow falls so slow,

          so quietly these days, it never falls
          completely.

          *

          Winter gives a face to blindness.
          It binds a stone

to stone, the way
a signature binds a broken contract.

          A northern shreds
          the registry of heaven,

and we shovel our walk,
as the law demands.

          We scrape our mirrors.
          cast our salt.

          *

          If you stare at the white
          of a ruined eye,

it feels a little rude.
You know better of course.

          And still you feel the pull of it.
          Still the ache

that sinks the sterile pins
of stars against the new black glass.

Whatever the effrontery,
          it is yours alone.

Whatever the effacement,
it is one half sky,

          the other the snow in the print
          of the eye. And rising.

          *

My mother left me her freshman poems,

          the ones she shared
          with Auden,

and though he did not care for them,
he penned a reading list:

          Kierkegaard's journals,
          Pascal's meditations,

the introvert's guide to the unresolved.
She only got so far.

          I wanted to tell her,
          I love this part: the snows

of New England disabling your path.

          I wanted to say, keep going,
          path or no path.

Read a little Kierkegaard, look up in silence.
Think back, if you can,

          to your life as a nervous child,
          then look back down again.

*

          When I think of snow, I am
          most alone.

When I am reading
and penniless on a bus,

          and the air outside is fatal.
          One shrill breath

blows the funereal raft across a page.
I have read this book a million times,

          and I always get lost
          in the passage I love.

Where the snow is deepest.

          *

Imagine you are alive again
and reading in a chair.

          And the book says, so what
          is it like, your book. And then you see

no book. Only your head
bowed down among the depressing

          angels. Imagine
          flocks of cloud bound for slaughter.

What do you say to those
you lift on the light that made them.

          To the feathers of the downfall
          where no two are the same.

          *

          My mother taught me,
          if you fall in snow,

pack the broken part in ice.
If not ice, then snow.

          Most of what I write I forget.
          It helps, late, when I am writing.

No end for the ended,
the name that falls

          into other names.
          The many as one and no two are the same.

When a wound heals,
it turns harder, darker.

          And then, in time,
          it scars. It whitens. It writes.

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Copyright © 2021 Bruce Bond All rights reserved
from River Styx
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission