There was snow in the night
and it was like a beacon on a rocky hill
that had decided to become
a flower, but then,
upon reflection, wasn’t quite sure
just what kind of flower it was—
aster, or anemone—and so
became an actress
or something glamorous
like that, endowed with a body
that moved as it wished
in the sunlight, until it became
a muscle, one of the minor ones,
the type a man doesn’t know he has
until he strains it, and thus
feels, in pain,
something like presence,
which is insatiable, so that the snow,
arriving in the night, was forced
to become a chapel
inside of which men and women
kept huddling, generation after generation,
their devotion made no sense
but the snow liked the way it felt
to have worshipers inside it,
or in flight
from some larger worship,
a smallish ocean
someone had forgotten about
and left out in the cold
like so much spare change
glued down by children, with their gum,
in the street and in the hope
of spectacle, an elder trying to pry
that small worth away
from the body
of a wren, or rather, from the idea
of that body, the snow thinks,
a little sad now, a little desperate,
a little bored with the vertical
and all the electronic chatter
the continents make
in their sleep, the tectonic gossip,
unlike the wren,
small, slender, elegant,
something with weight that nevertheless
manages to sustain
a figure
either for losing or for loss
through song, becoming
in turn a tongue, in search of a mouth,
which starts as a factory but ends
as a bandage, signature
of both the wound and its healing,
which seems like the right gesture
except that in the darkness
it’s difficult to see
just how much the snow resembles
the stars from which it appears
to have descended, a likeness shed
the way a snake sheds
its mythic predilection
for lying, each lie growing out of the lie
that preceded, children on holiday
chance upon the sloughed integument
and bear it home, carefully,
almost reverently,
with the corpses of mollusks
and funny-shaped rocks, constructing
their own shrines,
their own miniature devotionals
until the children themselves
decide to become
orchards, some drowned
or drowning, salt-inflected, others
laden with sweet fruit,
even in winter,
which one hand plucks, and wraps
in colored tissue paper,
and places in a box,
and the box onto the bed of a truck,
and thence into the hold of a ship
and across a wide space
of fish and virtue and ingratitude
and so on
and back out again,
so that eventually, another hand
brushes the garment
away from the ripened globe
and raises it
to a set of lips, which part,
to a set of teeth, which bite, and the taste
is something
like the sleep of a banker
in an airplane, and something
like looking through a microscope,
and something like a silk parachute
that has lain folded
on a closet shelf for so long
it has missed the war for which it had
been manufactured, intended,
like the reflection of an eye
in cold water,
a lamppost, or an arson,
something livid
or something burning,
like a hillside in winter, on which
fresh snow has fallen.