sitting in a cold house
staring at my empty wood stove
thinking it’s my fault
that she went cold
and with the lights out it’s brighter
outside than in
the snow reflecting the clouds
reflecting the lights from town
a house is a strange husk
home to so many others
like the 18 white-footed mice
I’ve slaughtered this winter
or my dreams which I no longer recall
but which I presume to exist
like the giant rat snake whose skin
I found in the ceiling
Limbs against the snow, outlined with more snow. Treetops no longer canopies but the bare nets of need. Their no-longer-rare caresses and collisions in the winter wind. The moans of the ice-bound. How tormented they’d be if they hadn’t retreated to the underworld, that silken matrix of rootlets and hyphae, to trade fermented memories of sunlight for the bones of a mouse.
winter den
a slow leak of breath
growing needles
snowy meadow
seedhead bending into
its own pit
I lost my sense of smell for just two days. When it came back, the first odor I noticed was soil, which still surprises me this time of year. When I was a kid, the only time the temperature rose above freezing in January was for a few days of warm weather toward the end of the month, a little false spring we called January Thaw.
white clippings
from my haircut
winter garden
Rachel went back to work after a ten-day self-quarantine. She had what might’ve been the common cold, though five of the other people who looked after the same special-needs person tested positive for Covid. That’s the hell of it, the not knowing whether one might be infectious or immune.
winter
afternoon moon
Seeing the almost bare trees as antennae—intelligence-gathering stations for an alien umwelt, the rococo feelers of moths.
lonesome hollow
speaking softly so the void
doesn’t reply
What I miss most of all in the colder months: beetles and butterflies, crickets at night, and those delicate ninjas the ichneumon wasps. The way they tap the ground with paired canes, sniffing, listening.
unmarked path
a stick leaning on a tree
for the next hiker
I mistook dysphoria for euphoria once on purpose, and it almost worked. When you live in the forest, winter—not summer—is the season of light. And so an empty plate became the full moon, and the mouse in my filing cabinet was a companion animal. I could sometimes hear her late at night, shredding my old poems for nesting material. I meanwhile was building a cenotaph out of cigarette butts. My disemboweled television watched over me while I slept.
last cigarette
as long as grass grows
or rivers run
rubbing my belly I grow
old and ugly
all winter I am broke
and in summer like a child
I dig for gold
the earth going to pieces
in my pocket
it is winter
and we speak
with passionate hands
in the world beyond
there will be no ground
that is not white
I go bone by bone
through the whole
strange city
snowflakes
on my bald head
tapping woodpecker
subnivean
I tunnel through the day
half awake
Groundhog Day
the former coal town living
off a shadow
cabin fever
today’s potato flaky
as old wood
meltwater pool
the way my reflection
keeps shivering
cold moon
the shrinking circle
of my needs
the hobo is missing
one of his fingers
bone zero
freezing in mid-stride
at a snake-shaped stick
25 years
since the snow that brought it down
measured in moss
after the chainsaw
the silence
big as ever
windthrow
ice storm
blizzard
where are the canopy gaps of yesteryear
one small bird
to salvage all those logs
winter wren song