Poem: Fall To Winter

 Fall To Winter

 

you spruce tree,

scholar of profuse stylus 

who scrawls in wind, 

such dark renaissances

baffle your earnest searchings.

for your fountainous green inkwells

have gone 

and now you stuff blossoms of frost

into your old, scraggly coat.

with forelimbs to the ground, 

arthritic of silvered fingerbone,  

how you pray! 

to a crown of stars stark as no nimbus,

suffering clouds of crushed gravestone

and jaws of ice unkind to wood 

or skin--

and yet you murmur-whisper-moan,

goaded by gusts,

and somehow hum

hum still,

dreaming a mobile of glazed glances,

while gawking at the moods of snow,

and the way that the stones,

in their cocoons of negative celsius,

are not so cemeterial 

as they could have been:

tinged with grizzle, yes, old and stoic,

but very much alive.

==============================

10/25 

8/14/24 mods