WINTER
Winter
is a dead man’s game
north wind bellowing insults
cutting
stinging
anvil-like solidity
beneath stiffening toes
hunched over like a drunken
climber
dodging a glacier’s vengeance
Breath
in vaporous gulps
stammering in January dialect
iron landscapes
severed flatland carcass
spires of ice
hard-shell rapidity
over sun flecked roofs
serrated crescents of frost
marking the windows
sparrows skidding
across crusted canyons
dissected by diagonal planks
of waning light
light starved voices
wailing against the entombment of the season