On the Space between Snow Flakes Falling on a Late Afternoon in Early January

there was
December...

Blue light
your pink tongue
emerges, darting out
of the fog
of the breath
of this breathless
adoration.  You are a child
and this creation--
this marvel,
this amusement--
this World is more
than could be imagined
even by God.  See how
these bodies, suspended
by light--these shimmering
angles, these timid angels--
are stirred.

In the sky's grey
cauldron, it doesn't matter,
it doesn't "signify"
whether or not
this one is really
the same one you chose
out of all of those snowflakes
some demigod has shaken
loose from the tree
of that gelid heaven.

They come
humming or dumb
down in downy
liberty, alight on the breezes:
But the storm's playful pitch--
the itch, the hurl,
the roll could not prevent
yet another suicide
another brother
cauterized (or vaporized)
on the stiff tip
of an eight year old's
tongue.

Remember?

The generations of snow-
flakes make everything
look (in it by distraction
or scrutiny) the same.  Uniform,
white and wrinkled.
There is no use
for reincarnation.
Some kind of science
might be merely faith
in the preservation
of matter, a fact
that will not be lost
on you.  Or, in time,
on anyone.

Embers...

From smoke
and mirrors
retrieve me.
There is no solace,
no consolation.  I know.
In superstition and myth,
we might invent--
out of the expanding
amplitude of our fears--
beasts and burden
some categories.
And this must be
the vernacular of some
tenuously defined
"hope":

Concupiscence, contrition,
atonement, salvation
or a guardian
angel, her scentless candle
unnoticed against
the pungencyof our own
unconfessable
sins.

The rhetoric is thin
like the air here;
the agitated theology is
loathsome and naive.
All these words,
fumbled by our fingerprints,
and jumbled in the iris
of our claustrophobic eyes,
record nothing
save for questions
impossible (yet essential)
to the fabric of
our delusions.

But what we do know,
(more or less) is that
each discrete mandala,
steeped in its recombinance
along with
every accidental
piece of perfection--
pulled with weaving spyrograph
mechanical flowers, specimens
impatient and strange--
somehow come to populate
the barren possibility proposed
by the shivering white
of the arctic page.

You see more,
than all fifteen billion
renditions of God's
icy eye.  And every snowflake,
dancing,
falls from nothingness
infused
with miraculous individuation.

Only to disMember, someday
melt...

But just so
you don't forget:
Without language,
with only light
and water, each snowflake
knows the gravity
of it's uniqueness
yet spins,
a grinning dervish--
a grace
that traces the fall
but wants for only
the soft nothingness
that lies...

         between pillowed feathers,
and the waters give,
between stars and galaxies
and universes
stretching to contain,
between tones
on the maestro's ledger,
between notes choking
in bassoon and throat
between the bodies
of honest lovers
between the words that create
the lies.