In Lost Places

       I never knew I loved winter.

In fact,
I must have mislaid photographs of white places
during the storm, the black and white of a
gazebo, or the distance between everything. And there
is a vertigo of song here—it is clever,
       maddening,

                         increasingly       December.
I am here again in the season; I carry a talisman,
a rosary, and a string-of-letters written
in white.

In the evenings the cluster of city lights rein in
these eyes--they clarify the low clouds that hang
from the sky like summered mist, but summer is not home.
And I think
I can see spring--it is an opening scene,
where mountains grow and fingers spread cool,
begging for release.

(I can still feel the laughter each
time I turn the soil.)

At times I lie like a lily without stem, speak to it
in its own Italian,
mouthing the words I long

to hear. At times, I fly like a gull into interstices,
and with no one looking, I fall deeper into the lungs of
Neruda, taste the thread--open dividers that held
for so        long.

And with little breath, I dribble language, hope to rise
from the
hard of
      a season I dislike,
       but still,
                    but still,
                         but still, the pearl of my spine
                                      will not be strung!

So tomorrow, I sleep like
the past [lovers] that knelt before it.
In spring I will sow a blossom, a yellowed daffodil
from bulb - it too will brighten the city once more, where
in this very moment, seems sheltered in white.

*Draft II