Winter in Linkou
bodies bedraggled together
the algebra of pull against the weathered air, creak and pivot, blend and bend toward small openings of warmth, shuttle because it and we shall disappear only to misremember the caged season set loose, bodies a carriage of hearts and hymns, the lantern glass upon which our thoughts and ruminations radiate divestment, together, spirit writ large and wilding against the skin and bone barriers, bone and bodice, an ache-laughed temple not because of beauty but because in our forlorn trappings, all and every part of us enjoined, is magnified, there, all that is contained within heliography and rhyme pressed hard and knocking against the delinquent disappearing time, sung out and spreading, winter anatomy entwined, cadence, whelp, tongue-touch or rhyme.
when the winter softens language in the hunger for you
when the winter hardens sound and light trickling swift beneath the crackling trees, we grow restless in a defrosting, thawed hearts reaching seaward and netting hope, oneiric calls, a chatting, the ruggedized heart brushed clean, awaiting the tone of toes scribbling in the sand wavering and light scrolls, when the winter softens, the trees stretch wide beneath the licking sky, dropped illumination between the snow stamps, between the falling bronchial arteries bloodless, life vaping upon anemic limbs, flurries scribbling air broken open past the dunes, a traveler, you away westward and green and I am coming, in a dream, the algebra from me to you when the winter hardens, language burbles the interlocking winter love’s effluence in the night market merchant well if not us then who there alone in the work and swirl of language grieving when the winter softens what we endured in lines of light and lifted sorrow.
when the winter softens you
