Category: Writing

Winter Figure

Draw. Erase.

Draw. Erase.

Draw a symbol of renewal

: crocus, baseball, robin. No. Rub it out

: too romantic, too sentimental, and much too soon.

Draft instead the black-plumed preacher

in the back woods—be-sooted raven, riled fundamentalist,

that besotted Cassandra high in the black back woods, 

who frets over winter’s excesses and counts/curses/condemns

every person, dog, cat that comes and goes below it

on the road to hell in a freeze-dried world.

Sketch cats agoraphobic that slink/crouch/slide

with flattened ears from barn to bush to shed

, schizoid from nightmares of being fed

to a fanged and hackled open space.

Draw euphoric people multi-hued and mechanoid.

Scatter them helter-skelter on wheels/tracks/skis,

ecstatic hearts pacing the harangue of oriental pistons.

Trace the stubble and tattered stems of Queen Anne’s Lace

where it decays and smudges the drifts of the paper white back lot slope

: charcoal remnants / trace reminders of seasons long erased.