Winter Scrawl

She listened so hard

to nothing, or

to those dissonances of winter that field

the ear and tune the world

with crackling pine; the pine

tree could not be heard

but for a brittle

rendering of the air,

And the snow began uneventful,

then in a longing

for the ground it heaved

down with a hapless sigh.

 She made no address, standing

in a prism of sky

ground tree—vast

and vast but ever intimate—

She, one countless

narrow consequence,

spread with eye and ear

and waving hand.

And inferred that branches

in apparent death, or sky

drawn in unseemly

light, never – when

the quiet got so dense or

time cast itself a blanket

from unrelenting scraps—never

eased into oblivion.

– Meg Sullivan

xoxo