These years are winter. The skies are overcast with dramatic clouds. When they break
heavily, as they will, all around us the snows will begin. Fallen too wet for the slopes
to hold, they will fall underneath, loosening an avalanche of rubble upon too frail and
kind a thing to live in such cold.
This is possible.
These years are winter. The stars on glassy nights still wheel in the old constellations
according to law, abiding the brink, the space, the vacant abyss.
Turning under and rising away from the horizons, going from us and coming back forever to
us, starfalls are the hidden promises we hold.
This also is possible.
These years are winter. Cereus, night-blooming in a warm house, has one flower to be
borne. Cactus, the crooking stems keep safe the nectar in their flesh. Their spines are
cruel. We do not know the time w hen we will open the door of a room upon a strange glow
of apple-green chalcedony, chrysoprase, in whose white blossom deeply cupped is held the
pollen all these years have gathered.
And this is possible.
Or they are nothing.