When winter is here, no one cares
how fate is exposed by your absence,
or how the place lacks for the missing color—
it's too cold to stare at the bare facts of nature.
Evenings are spent by cutting paper
until you return with a soft bang.
Your insistence, however, is a strong memory
whose vagrant log is a warmer eternity
until the advent of the next Ice Age. What a relief
when you reappear, as if the most wanted lover
had returned, or the fractured beat of your heart,
making its presence felt again, had left a morning
wake-up call to the flames of waning passion—
the burnt out filament of a light bulb.