It is February. Ice is general. One notices different degrees of ice.
Its colours—blue white brown greyblack silver—vary.
Some ice has core bits of gravel or shadows inside.
Some is smooth as a flank, you cannot stand on it.
Standing on it the wind goes thin, to shreds.
All we wished for, shreds.
The little ones cannot stand on it.
Not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, can stand.
Blindingly—what came through the world there—burns.
It is February. Ice is general. One notices different degrees of ice. 

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she’d tell it to go to hell,
and she’d find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me. 

River fogs (7 AM) stray and begin, shiver and begin
on the September mill rocks.
Bits of leaf mirror along. I have arrived at my sanity.
Evidence (7 PM): while she medicates I walk by the river.
Millwheel smells like wet cornhusk.
On my back (2:38 AM) in the dark at Dorset Motel I listen to the radiator click
and to her, awake on the other side of town
in the hot small room
gripping a glow-in-the-dark rosary.
Whatever they say about time, life only moves in one direction,
that’s a fact, mirroring along.
River fogs (7 AM) go flayed and silvery
when it dawns dark
on the day I leave.
DANGER DO NOT DROP OR DRAG ANCHOR
reads a sign just off the selvedges.
Mindingness gulps us.
Her on the bed as bent twigs.
Me, as ever, gone.