Something different for today.
Through town and out beyond
Run rivers in clear, slow death
Day’s meagre heat leaves all earth and sky:
Life saps, saps still, to a blue glaze
Softly starts the solid stock
Locks a hardened skin
Such flimsy bergs
Slide to can-crush crunch
Barely a whisper – a frozen breath
And back-up, up, up
Further and higher it is clear
For the present
But inch by hoarded inch
Blocks collide for the new cold road
A cliché of life’s accumulators;
Decline, stiff still meanderings, folly and sense.
On either rime-reeded side
White-formed siege platforms hold fast
Until loud above the water’s ice-dropping course
It snaps
Echoing from the bank’s shelf
And drops itself onto the mud edge
Leaving cubes dangling
Old Man, Old Father, Old
Softly laid, rageless, bare head
Form of winter’s form –
Watcher and waiter allowing
How much it must it knows not
And cares less
Clasped in its channel
For dead days and nights
Until the sun’s imperious nod
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