Dehiscence of war,
The spent shell is the split gourd.
Dry fruit of dry years.

The snowflake is castellated cold,
Of chill crenellations and turnings narrow.
Court of pie-powders and gray-skied brazier smoke,
Of inner mazework dimmed to ****** holes,
Or the hooded machicolations from tower spire
Of oily darkness and arrowslits of Greek fire.

—

The snowflake is Medieval reliquary,
The frozen skull of rain and blood clear of sin,
Wind-captive with its prayer of quiet
On quietest lips, close to wine and sacrament.
Or the chapel and its waxen paramours
Of incorrupt body and candlelight upon the moors.

—

The snowflake is the mighty frozen spark,
Fire-forged and ironwrought,
Under the eye of Hephaestus,
Blacksmith of sorrow’s wind.

The earth-dark octaves of her singing hair,
Sung-circles of campagna, the citadel,
And campanile bells in the Segestano air.
The pail sits like an expectant kiss on the lip of the well.

When young, to the sun
Confide ~ when old, to the sun
Despise ~ Then, the sun.

Death is such a thing
As dark cherries
Plucked to bobble from the basket heap,
And so then slighted from offhand,
Be the underling to the massy arbor sweep,
Be the stilled ponderance of solitudes.

The desert is a hummingbird
With wings of hovering heat.
Weightless idler,
Forever in love with the acanthus leaf
And the nectar of the far Aegean.

Her hand is a bookmark in my heart,
So many smoothed pages ago.