Winter Words

Calendar pages:
one scrumpled day
dies in a garden

spun to fools’ gold,
where wind mews
over twigs and bones

at an outhouse door,
black sky sustains
the buoyancy of loss,

dried sap
knots branch to branch,
caging a star

whose variable glance
is light’s tumult
cut to the quick

yet cold to the retina
as once upon a time,
remembered pain.