Grey-yellow grass, late February
Sky pallid as a face under the earth
The thyme in my garden dead with the freeze
and the city block agaves now flat in their beds
Fat tears from brown leaves running into the gravel

I’m swept away by shallow street rivers
With gasoline and halite in haunted mirrors
the melting snow of Spring’s early moratorium
While elsewhere, the last handfuls of bone and feather
Must forage at the edges of dead-end fields

And twice I am drawn to stand alone in the
Middle of a road, a grave in the weeds
to someone’s dog, and a willow
Felled by lightning ‘fore the cut of ice
Never once heard but enshrined in white

Mute and loved by a drowning earth
Sleeping in the arms of a mourner
in the aftermath of her rage- Or better?
To be struck- under eyes with awe alit,
Soon to be dragged o’er wet dirt
by the light of a callow sky