Margin Song

In the bardo between seasons—
I’m undone
in sudden April snow.
This thin static hinged 
to an ashen sun,
unwinding 
where the sky was. I look up
and the flurry falls through me. 

Holy Saturday 

It isn’t absence, 
this darkness. Suspended here,
speechless in the wake 

of the Word’s descent,
we become the tomb that waits 
to unveil itself

as vessel of light 
and light alone, the light
undying, we die 

to know.

March, Upstate 

All at once, 
the crash of birdsong 

becomes clear crystal 
revolving mid-air. 

A crystal
segmenting the new sun

into panes of sound. 
All at once, 

spring tangles 
the senses. 

The field melts 
into its reflection—

I walk the edge 
of an inverted world. 

Postscript

1

Ice-capped
mud-veined  
snowpack
quilted over 
an old battlefield 
struck by 
                 sun.

2

The long thaw begins
with a nonsense syllable 

echoing in dark  
woods. An animal shrieking 

as if shot up from the ground. 

Stride 

The freezing night 
seals a chamber

of wordless prayer 
between my mouth 

and hands. Wind 
kicks snowdrifts

into static; heavy 
pine boughs 

scaffold the dark. 
Leave it to late winter

to drown out 
an inner voice,

the mumbling locus 
of a poem.

That was a form 
of warmth, a small fire 

in the chest, a thing 
to conjure 

and watch over
as hours pass. 

Tonight, 
I take dictation

from without,
from lack, 

and lean 
into another gust.

A few windows 
along the road 

glow deep umber
and I hold the color

under my tongue 
until it dissolves. 

Polar Low

Half-sheathed in ice
a yellow double-wide trailer

mirrors the inarticulate morning. 
The amnesiac sun.

And nothing else
to contrast these variations of white

and thicket 
choked by thicket

in thin piles that dim the perimeter.

Every other noun 
frozen over.

Moonlight turns

the new snow
blue. A lawn 

hovering

in darkness—
radiant

with absence.

*

No difference now
between the field and river 
that runs beside it.
Both under new snow, the seams 
recede; my vision, weightless.

*

The day undone 
in gauze of rain 

on the brink
of snow. 

*

Silos like totems
in the snow and the stubble
of a dormant crop.

The Reprieve

A week
that freezes, thaws,
and freezes again.

The skyline scales
and cracks.
Morning’s frayed

gray plumes
pull through the wreck
and the wreck in mind.

To be reminded
there’s grace
in ordinary weather,

in the reprieve
from neon
and clouds low enough

to cloud thought. Grace
in daylight, the drowse
and sway;

and how, when it’s this
thin, things barely cling
to their names. Grace

to be nameless, a form
among forms, drifting
in January glare.

Grace, too,
when windows
reflect and distort,

at night,
the shape of a room.

The Turn

Awake in the pre-dawn dark
at the end of a difficult year,

I gather scraps from a notebook
to contain grief
in private speech.

The words repeat like a rosary: 

sun, silence, time,
light, day, pain. 

As if ink could snare a voice 
beyond me—for company—

and dissolve the “I”
in an image
at once blurred and vivid.

That was the vow and the dream.

Morning, bright now 
between the margins—

cloud, window, 
sparrow, rain—

at the end of a difficult year.

For the Winter Solstice

Snowbanks gleam 
against the withered sun. 

Shimmer of snowmelt 
on asphalt, freezing 

into cellophane sheets. 
I walk to write 

into the nameless
and return with a phrase 

to defy a speechless season. 

I belong here, dissolving
into the stray sounds 

of an Upstate expanse—

grave upon grave 
under ice. 

Lingering shades 
of anemic 
orange 
cling 

to the wooded horizon 
rendered into tendons

and vying 
with powerlines

to divide the fog.


*


Not alone
in the company of snow—
I take dictation.


*


The snow beneath
the tree’s shadow
branches into silence.


*


Above the altar,
beside the crucifix, light
molded by the frame
of a window—this shadow—
becomes another icon.


*


Faint December sun 
smudged between wire-thin branches.
Behind me, the creek—
and the sound of the water 
as it clenches into ice. 

First Sunday of Advent

Inexplicably, the scent of jasmine 
threads the night air. Cold air. 
Closer now to winter than the depths of fall.
Nothing’s in bloom but a dumpster
overflowing, and a few chimneys—
it must be the woodsmoke that thins 
into imagined jasmine. Walking home, 
streetlights dim, I see as far as I can think. 
And here the season begins, in the dark, 
waiting for the Word to emerge
like the amber glow 
in a window at the end of the road. 

The Last Poem

It is enough 
to be nothing,
porous
to what appears.
It is enough 

to sit on a bench
and watch a contrail
dissolve into dust, 
to make a day of it.

It is enough 
to look
in order to see,
and to know
there’s a difference. 

It is enough
to walk myself awake 
in sub-zero wind,

snow-blind 
and heartbroken.
It is enough 
to forget. 

It is enough
to borrow 
from the dead
a voice 

to sing through,
to survive the season.

It is enough,
the poems cramped 
in the margins 
of a water-stained
notebook—

leave them there
to be revised
by time. 

It is enough—

alone 
at the end of the year 
engulfed by a presence 
I am not compelled to name.


                        (from Decades: Selected Poems)

This is how

far we’ve come 
to not need 

to speak. What’s 

between us—
the red and 

yellow leaves. 


*

Trace the seam

where the rain 
turned to snow

at the brink 

of night—streaks
of white en-

graved in blue.


*

The first snow

levels out 
the noise in 

mind. Open

the window—
blinding white 

breathing through.

Altar and Offering


i.

Through November’s
arterial horizon
traffic flickers.
Mountain bare 

but for a bent cloud
clipping the ridge. 
What would it mean
to see clearly—

to know 
nothing’s there
other than what is. 

 
ii.

A clearing 
between scrub 
and birches peeling

(white sheets flagging)
where sunset sparks.

And those hollow tones: 
geese gathered at the river’s 
gravel bank. 

They’re not singing; 
they’re sounding out

a sequence of notes 
describing the color 
and shape of the cold.  

 
iii.

The poem begins without a word
while I walk through sideways snow.

Snow barbed by a gone season. 

There’s joy in the unsaid and how it accumulates.

This god-vacant pain, the run-on days, disrupted. 


iv.

The day before 
the longest night 

of the year,
December sun

snags runoff 
from last week’s 

snowfall—
a silver cord binding 

my eyes to asphalt,
traffic, dead leaf

floating in the flash. 
Overnight rain 

rearranged
the mountain:

white to red, 
faint red

pulse
under russet. 

Blinded again, 
I’m rooted

to a world 
without me.

Wordless prayer
—this vacancy

where the new life begins.



v.

Streetlight 
suspends hail
in a sepia orb.

The fricative hiss
as stripped trees 
sift it. I hear it

as language 
refusing 
to become speech.

A circular breath
extinguishing 
the familiar.

 
vi.

Open the blinds 
to snowlight—
that bright, particular pain. 

There, in the shock,
locate the real 

before it sinks
into synesthesia. 

This is how winter 
makes itself useful:

it tricks the body

to trick 
the mind still.


vii.

Up late listening 
to rain run ice 

into mud. 
Does the room 
contain sound 

or does sound 
contain the room? 

Walls dissolve 
in the dark—
a locked door opens.


viii.

I covet the cold, 

how it punctures 
memory 

and dislodges 
the rot. When 

wind 
is enough—

harsh enough—
to smother thought.


ix.

Clouded 
by snow fog

a snowed-over 
mountain—mind

makes it 
visible.

 
x.

After the snow squall
sun mutes 
what snow remains 
in my vision, and the figure 

on the other side of the crosswalk

too bright to say

walking toward 
or away from me.


xi.

A few days lost 
to a false spring.
Black slush caged 
by bolts of light. 

My mind, jolted, 
turned jagged;
but last night 
the cold returned

and when I woke
morning was a window
in the shape of a field
draped in frozen fog.


xii.

A vulture circles 
a shotgun’s echo, carving

into cloudless sky 
the shape of the field below.

The air alone
both altar and offering.

Prescription

To think through 
each word’s 
particular weather. 

To stand 
just far enough 
outside of the page.  

A field drapes 
the eye 
in limitless revision. 

How shadows
that fill the gap 
between two stones 

imply the sky’s weight.

Pilgrim (On the Feast Day of St. Benedict Joseph Labre)

Emptied of the world,
you walked the earth

(God-gone 
and God-given)

in an undertow
of prayer. 

In a crown of gnats
you swooned

and slept. 
Saint,

on your feast day 
when the rain passed

a dozen potholes
held a dozen suns.

October 30

To take in what’s left 
of October, the colors
that trail behind and 

within me, as I 
walk beneath the flares sent up 
with a vividness 

the senses stumble  
to apprehend. The red-singed 
yellows—I hear them 

more than see them—and 
somehow the sound lodges in
my throat. How does sound 

come from color and 
pass through the body, making 
the flesh transparent 

to passing weather. 
Only in October, this 
negotiation 

between apparent 
loss and accumulation—
gathering silence 

to prepare a place 
for the looming silence to 
bear down its cold.