The grip of winter tightening, its thinned

volleys of blue-wing teal and mallard fly

from the longbows of reeds bent by the wind,

arrows of yearning for our different sky.

A season's revolution hones their sense,

whose target is our tropic light, while I

awoke this sunrise to a violence

of images migrating from the mind

Skeletal forest, a sepulchral knight

riding in silence at a black tarn's edge

hooves cannonading snow

in the white funeral of the year,

antlike across the forehead of an alp

in iron contradiction crouched

against those gusts that urge the mallards south

Vizor'd with blind defiance of his quest,

its yearly divination of the spring.

I travel through such silence, making dark

symbols with this pen's print across snow,

measuring winter's augury by words

settling the branched mind like migrating birds,

and never question when they come or go.

The style tension of motion and the dark,

Inflexible direction of the world

as it revolves upon its centuries

with changes of language, climate, customs, light,

with our own prepossession day by day

year after year with images of flight,

survive our condemation and the sun's

exultant larks.