Into What, Even Then, Was No Longer

Tell me something about longing—

the sun seems to say, as though three years

of heat could not

                          keep what had been done

to the April birds, the hackles of ferns raised

                          to that earlier light, when the body was

less cruel, more firm

in its sweetness. Now, the snow is what

                          it does to me—a coldness which pierces

but arrives nowhere; the way grief falls

with sound but no weight, an emptiness made

not by absence

but its continuous leaving—we live and walk

                                                            in that vanishing—

Here, everything washed clean of color

is called dead—

                                             the marrow unribboned

from a coyote bone, my shadow retreating

                          into each frosted fig. What then is left

to shatter into admission. Still, I am

close to the fantasy

                          of sharpening against another’s

shameless whetstone, to circle back

to what the sleet estranged from me—my own

footprints gathered

around this lone snowdrop, its stunned

gesture—I am crouched

                          in this paleness; your innermost light—