give me winter

My neighbor draws hands like houses, chipped of paint and curled against the sun. He drags charcoal mostly, and enjoys the audits of his daughter.  She knows her father by the cracked faces he pulls from his shirt pocket, people bent over their craft, winced in their subsistence.

Consider the ratchets we've set to him, the buckles to his wrists and the bit on his tongue
which takes stories gleaned on the eye and buries them like roots packed too tightly in the earth.

This warmth, this easy prairie frequented by peddlers of sloth and shriven men, it is retreat's great stage.  It sinks the ties and sets our tracks to the lying sun, when what we need is night, what we need are the forest leaves in retreat, the clandestine dispatches that come in advance of the whip winds and frost to empty the unhardy tracts and ready the bodies for sharp breaths.

give me winter

The danger I've seen is in the slow sweat, the crawl of skin that says don't move don't think don't lift yourself to become that creator, your world is full.  Suffer the sun, the day in the light you'll log your fare and be a man thankful for rest.  the turn of those words will snag.  don't make my neighbor a man thankful for rest but from time to time a thankful man that rests.

give me whole states of breathless grass, frozen upright on the hills.  give me young men, delirious laid out on concrete swearing that good infinity above them is better read when man leans away from the sun.  give me the sisters who pilgrim up the logging roads. let me sing quiet and shivering as they sink their hands in the clearings and resolve to bring back the earth to where they go from here.