[Hear the author read this poem]

Magnolia offering blossom now
to the first hour’s thaw
(there is no false thaw, even an hour’s).

Can explain anything. How orphan
swans imprint to their handler’s
hands—there’s Leda for you, awash

with orphic swans. And here is
the snowling junco on seasoned
wood. Snow-long. One may be

many things, and have a temperature,
and all the emotions made for men
as sun was for the shed roof’s tin.

Ice slides from a slant sloughing
tracks to the shingles, snow atop
stopped cars like siren bars.

Fields in cloud-caught light. Streets
salt white near sun-eroded brick.
The light’s hanging perforations like

phone slips on a pole’s poster
for something lost. There are no narratives,
economics, or theology, only the geologic

triad: heat, pressure, time.
Dear. Have seen the need to go
to extremes so they won’t come

for you. Snow no longer melting
but melted to its presences, re-adhering
outside the frozen swamp by billboards blank

or hand-painted or billboards dark.
Rising fog. Hand-painted ice.
Insist: there is nothing that is not green.