Winter Song
White edges the branches of the morning tree.
White crisscrosses the open grave,
This unmarked field. At its border,
A cicatrix of tracks heads toward eternity.
The tracks lead elsewhere. Trains
Insert an urgency when they will.
The sleeping grapes, the dead tomatoes:
This was summer, once. I prefer
It now. Prefer silence, marble, the frosted
Cake changed to stone. Prefer blue light
To gold. Not the bare brown trees,
But fitted out in white finery
They make a new kind of heaven—bleached,
Barren, beautiful as the blanked page.