Came to me—
         Who?
She.

Snow is irrational
and the rare song above the snow insane.

Every tree is a personality:

Fred,
I don’t know what to do.
About me and you and the dream
which knocks and knocks at me, now has

But beautiful is the dog lost,
once headed east, then later

in the dark south. But
beautiful is the cold

All day I measure noses.
People are brought before me.
My brass calipers never lie.

Refugees flee their homes. Exiles
move back in, thirty-year echoes
of mortar shells rattling windows.

Whatever I hoped to believe,
I never imagined
the pitfall of consolation:

All day, the colorless heat
of too much summer:
parcels of darkness

It feels like a door in the light
through which the mind might pass at any moment,

My eldest son rolls over in his sleep
and, like an actor mid-soliloquy,
he murmurs, “Nothing—”