ISSUE: Spring 2012
Broad leaves of bittersweet enveloping the dead
and dying trees, flourishing up the trunks
and out across the lower branches, to
the few abandoned nests they haven’t yet
invaded: every leaf now almost seeming
to signal something to no one about the never
to be disentangled moment of itself,
how all their surfaces flash and go dim
all morning, in and out of focus, too bright,
too dark, too suddenly or slowly now
in ever varying miniscule degrees
of sun and shade too subtle to be named
changing before my eyes across what also
changes before my eyes without my seeing,
like the bloated carcass of the squirrel
caught in a crook of branches, bloated, seething
with little scavengers that carried it
away in sun and shadow as it shrank
invisibly to nothing but this flattened
wisp of dark between the flashing leaves.
Leaves signaling about it, whether they are or not,
something about what can’t be thought about,
impenetrable, irreducible,
as the recurring no time of the ice
you dream between you and an open door
you cannot enter, where the ones you come for,
look for, and even think you see inside it
looking out, are looking out, but not
at you, and only briefly, from a dark
that all at once is darker for the ice
that flashes up so brightly that it blinds.
