Altar and Offering

a poem for the cold

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.

This poem originally appeared in the anthology An Outcast Age, and in my book Decades: Selected Poems.