Pallid colors wash out from the sky in frigid patterns-
monotone colors create grayscale after bitter grayscale
in an endless show of snow and sleet and thunder.
The only other color is the energetic crimson
of her red raincoat,
weaving in and out of skeleton trees,
losing itself in the perpendicular monuments
of the fleeting
and soon forgotten.
This is the day-
this is the day when I forget
what it is to breathe autumn and spring,
what it is to see anything but glimpses
of something past
and something shattered-
like a ten dollar red raincoat
bought at the corner store on a rainy August day.
And from a distance, it seems, it could almost be that
here, among the desolate and the defeated,
in the midst of a winter consuming the terra cotta earth
in a broken world of tired streets and tired people-
here
there is a fire burning.