Out of her hourglass filled with memory
now half empty with forget
and laden with December,
falls,
from the grace of clouds in a winter's shroud,
a caked and wedded icing over chequered fields.
Over dawn a land reborn in style
coddles the farm in downy dreams.
Its drift,
blown to the hedgerows, in a woman's curve,
cottontails the hatted house in gingerbread.
The morning blarneys the blushing barn,
its wimpled roof once handsome and metal'd.
Pristine, the ermine land invites
the ditched and foraged fox.
Footsteps along a dotted line,
his sign.
How little the pen has colour over cold!
Not so the page.
Close silenced, by the distant ear-shot wind,
the snow-perched sparrows.
Even the chocolate stream,
lucid,
crochets quietly on its icing pass.
And clement, a sun-made photo-sky,
all clear to Aldebaran.
In this Elysium,
quiescent,
out of a firmament of blistering stars
and forever-rampant gravities, space curls away
as though it knows she is the centre of her universe;
safe from the neighbouring wars,
caught in the brief of morning glory
-an interlude of loveliness,
that nips her fingers and consumes her heart.
From QUAERE, 2003
