Wintering

All day, slow funerals have ploughed the rain.
We've done again
that trick we have of turning love to pain.

Grey fades to black. The stars begin their lies,
nothing to lose.
I wear a shroud of cold beneath my clothes.

Night clenches in its fist the moon, a stone.
I wish it thrown.
I clutch the small stiff body of my phone.

Dawn mocks me with gibberish of birds.
I hear your words,
they play inside my head like broken chords.

*

The garden tenses, lies face down, bereaved,
has wept its leaves.
The Latin name of plants blur like belief.

I walk on ice, it grimaces, then breaks.
All my mistakes
are frozen in the tight lock of my face.

Bare trees hold out their arms, beseech, entreat,
cannot forget.
The clouds sag with the burden of their weight.

The winds screams at the house, bitter, betrayed.
The sky is flayed,
the moon a fingernail, bitten and frayed.

*

Another night, the smuggling in of snow.
You come and go,
your footprints like a love letter below.

Then something shifts, elsewhere and out of sight,
a hidden freight
that morning brings in on a tide of light.

The soil grows hesitant, it blurts in green,
so what has been
translates to what will be, certain, unseen,

as pain turns back again to love, like this,
your flower kiss,
and winter thaws and melts, cannot resist.