winter soulstice 2005

the shortest day and the heart will recover
the eyes will be strengthened by the waxing light
as the sun melts the winter frost from the window glass
and the silver shimmer of sunlight across the saddle of ester dome, the monochromatic summits of the Alaska Range
and all of nature priastine and frozen
replendant in oplals the orange glow of snowoack
and the blue darknes theat takes us in her nocturnal web
the season makes promises
the dreamer repents
the last year winter bit like a drunken dragon
distiled with trickster brevity
painting gold star on my eyelids as I sleep
exhaling the blue fire
and finally,like the wounded bear mended
my skin is thicker, but the price on my skin
all has returned pink and shiny like the fresh strawberry flesh
of the newly knit scar-- the pulse beneath winter ice
and the fish still swim in my blood veins
the dragonflys are bustling in my head
the winter forest is arrranged like a familiarconstellation
sacred yet unnamed, an expansive landscape that spills out
from the tiny shadow of imaginng, the sketching, planting pruning,
and then shines an apparent beauty, like a timepiece fopund
what we do with our lives
from this point on
is entirley relative to the expanse of wings
the plane of heaven resting symetrically
upon the ocean and earth--the weight of the universe
upon the the winter ice
I recover like the soaring shadow of two birds on the ground
who I was, who I am , and who can be, earth bound and allusive, riding the sky, yet plunging earthward.