Winter

Don’t think
you have to speak
of the snow, branches
bent, weak
limbs broken
or of what you hear.
Everything is real
in the mind, the radio
waves on frequencies
that leave the leaves
undisturbed, and the snow,
general in the north
and now across the continent.
The storm has erased
every mark yesterday
you made on the road,
the path, the plow
opening a way
by burying everything else.
It was easiest
to be on foot,
to choose Velcro
over lace-up and avoid
the struggle of the snowshoe strap.
How else go
but with sharp
metal teeth,
a soft step.
The super blood
wolf moon is there
we heard on the news
yet there’s nothing
we can see
but cloud and mist.
Yet the moon.
Deer on the unplowed path
fat tires of trucks
and on the shore
looking west, then north
the snowed plain
you know to be
a lake became the moon
soft whipped into white hillocks
by the night’s long wind

Don’t think
you have to speak
about the country
that wind
this storm
everything real
and white in the blanking eye