False Winter

The suffering that wrings through our mouths
we mix along the fissures asleep,
drunk like young fathers.

Our mouths pushed below the waterline
by weight not our own, and by our own,
the mountains admit no attempt at prayer,
they offer no abstract song.

Real snow falls only once:
all other winters are an imitation.
A fucked reckoning is in store for those
—us—who obsess over what they've lost
instead of what they've been offered: a point

where forgetting is its own preposition,
the link between and between, the of
of all we've learned but have managed
to bring through our years and call new life

the closest we've come to recognition.