Ice Storm

The mist falls all night

all day a gray sky

each green needle

each red berry

each stone

each twig

encased

like

Venetian

millefiore

in a Victorian

paperweight

missing only

the outer globe

of a stark blue sky

shaking sugar white snow

over sun glistened ice

and a snow-day child

gazing upward

outward

beyond

the glass

at myself.

mist

dew glistened orbs

each magnify the morning

light the lines of every twig

Reader

Water ripples against the ice foam

crackling like someone paging quickly

through thin pages to a new season.

Neighborhood Competition

Each morning

the Big Dipper pours winter into the woods behind our home.

Every night

Orion struts haughtily overhead

hot on the trail of constellations mammalian while

almost invisible, the Pleiades sisters giggle at him.

Beneath these ancient lights

our house is a riot of disorganized sparkles vying for attention,

the familiar to all,

Christmas Constellation.

What is in the Waiting ...

of yellow-spotted salamanders until vernal pools thaw

and mud-hoveled green frogs silent beneath frozen ponds

of the six years underground seven-year cicada

and the pendulant chrysalis on ice-glistened grasses

of great horned owls invisible between nocturnal catches

and deer still and staring between camouflaging branches

of empty lined pages between inspirations

and blank white minds between imaginations?

December Warming

a warm night

with soft rain and

ground clouds

nestled near wetlands



a warm night

when tree frogs, lumpy

toads, and bullfrogs

could be sounding



a warm night

not in but out of season

all those sleeping,

unlike me, quiescent.

December First

Now grass

then snow,

now earth

then ice;

Autumn falls

to Solstice bite.