Listen: someone
is scissoring the clouds, snipping
the weather
into a dazzling squall of tiny white
vowels. The hills
have become an undulating clause,
contoured
by the going under of the light,
the distant hoo
of an owl’s lonely psalm. What
you once loved
about a dress—the delicate grammar
of its swoosh—
you have come to love about the snow:
the way
the pointed ice-ferns lisp the air,
rewrite
the yard into a stark, unrippled
fiction,
the forest into a thousand intertwining
questions.
Shhh—this is the sky unknitting itself,
wrapping you
in a baptism of cold, the monologue
of the wind
publishing its feathered rhetoric
across the roll
and dip of the field, the frozen cat-
tailed marsh.
A cardinal. A buckthorn. A sentence
of red berries
interrupted. You have entered
a kingdom
of unknowing—Holy is the sound
of forgetting.