It should be a denial, this morning,
che way winter's fallen across those hills so clearly

threatening coo much light, a whiteness diffusing a negative
until whatever image it might hold,

trees paled and indistinct like a body's map of nerves,
blurs into the cess of light. Even the train—

where Kappus leans his head on the cabin's paneling,
his eyes narrowed co watch a young woman

thoughtlessly brush her fingers along her breast,
tracing the embroidered, interconnecting pattern of infinities

in the yellow fabric—even the train seems vague
in light and motion, a grayed seam shifting

among minutes and days and the change
of seasons. In Prague, hours before the train would leave,

he walked down one street where most homes
had been knocked out of chis world by the war.

He knew the poet had lived here as a child,
and though he imagined chat child curled in a window seat

watching a bee walk slow spirals along his arm
as outside the year's first snow began its multiplying variations,

he couldn't find which shattered house had held the boy.
Kappus sleeps on the train, finally, and the woman

disembarks, leaving only a faint impression in the worn cushion
across from him. He dreams Rilke

grown old into another life, no longer poet but a beekeeper
in a pear orchard. He dreams chat in winter,