because nature speaks no language, just a quarter of
unbuilt ground would be enough for ten lives of song.
even then, somethings remain leftover, which i only perceive
in evenings when the stars are not there, and you are far away;
times of mania and the leviathan.

green heart of winter, you were born to take care of the
essence of snow and the hour that has not yet come.
somethings break through sounds and at the end of
our century, i can see you at the helm of every city, birdsong,
even light in that last vermeer.

i wish the millennia would be revealed to you sooner
even though it may immobilize us. bring me harvest of lilies,
violets and magnolias. blooms for me irreverent 
of seasons. i send letters to you with night-kites and 
no addresses, just to count clusters of words like constellations.

yes, my love could been better, but surely my labour is witnessed
over and over. 

one blizzard in january, new york
blizzard of one, roving.
breath of melancholy crossing with
a glacial pang. look how the snow
drifts, unchanged since horace, straining
branches that can barely sustain their
white weight. when i reach the field,
stuttering over the icy embers that
numb all my extremities, i think,
o how simple our desires are. in this
moment, i could almost see you standing
over there, pointing to the pine tree, saying
‘i know you from somewhere. a landscape
somewhere’ and at night when it is cold
but i am still too hot to dream, we lie awake
and i read you that long poem about snow
by horace:
            “today, don’t ask

             what tomorrow may be

             whatever time gives you

             put down for profit

             and dont reject love

             now when you’re young”

after the blizzard on a clear day, the last of snow softens
into darkness. the earth thawing with longing into longing.
we drive through the roads encased in glass
imagining an ocean evaporated here. more quickly now.
we enter into the arms of another freeway and boulevard
with signs that tell me to look to the rearview mirror.
against foothills and fog i can see the corners of my
visage lamenting of a lost battle for the shorelines.
all light gone out. i think i can hear the lost seas, the times
that collect us in ideograms of feathers and clouds; and
i was happy to have lost, all i have lost, in you.