The poem finally opened itself:
after readings enough, I saw
how the line broke, why
that word and not another.
The pleasure—self forgotten
in attending, briefly lodged
in someone else’s precision,
language doing its work.
Book to shelf. Poem to page.
The body turns to its ablutions:
water, soap, the day undone.
I glance up at the mirror—
it will not hold image.
Water still running. My hands, still wet, suspended.
The book already distant on its shelf,
the lines loosening, unheld.
He formed him
from the ground—
clay still wet,
clinging.
He bent close.
spent breath passed—
spittle,
the damp of earth
at the mouth.
And the man lived:
warm,
hungry,
leaking already
what he would lose.
This was not corruption.
This was the gift.
Sand—
before sight,
before consent,
light broken among grains,
each scattering its claim.
Heat intervenes:
lightning’s instant law,
the long travail of fire,
a stone descending
without regard.
What shatters
learns another order.
Glass remembers
its former dust.
In the mirror
a tower stands—
not stone,
but color
held by lead,
raised through fracture.
Harps flank it,
strings held still,
as if sound itself
were waiting
to be spared.
Notes lie as sand lies,
each apart,
each complete,
owing nothing
to the whole.
Or else the chord
was always present,
and hearing is the art
of consent.
Reflection is not the self,
but the hour
when the many
are allowed
to hold together.
The year begins again, before we ask,
arriving as the light does—simply so.
We do not grieve what has passed.
Too few the days, the weeks, the months, the years
still allotted to our keeping.
We do not hold them, nor pretend to save;
we meet the hour as it comes, unadorned,
and give it back in care, as best we can.
Icy stars—
points of ancient fire made brittle by distance,
as though the heavens themselves had entered winter.
They do not blaze; they prick.
They hang, hard and lucid, in a silence sharpened by cold.
Such stars feel less like promises than reckonings.
Their light arrives stripped of warmth,
having crossed immensities where heat was spent long ago.
What reaches the eye is endurance, not comfort—
illumination without mercy.
In winter they seem closer,
because the air has been scoured clean of softness.
Each star stands alone, exact, unblurred,
the sky insisting on precision,
on the refusal of haze, metaphor, or excuse.
Indeed—stars resemble snowflakes.
Each one discrete,
each one sharp with its own geometry,
no two quite alike,
yet all governed by the same severe order.
They fall not downward but inward,
settling upon the mind rather than the ground.
They do not melt; they persist.
What snow does to the earth—
muting, clarifying, equalizing—
stars do to thought.
Yet they are dissimilar in temperament—decisively so.
The star, for all its pinprick stillness to the eye,
is violence without pause:
fusion, a steady hammer at its core,
plasma boiling and convecting within its bounds,
only to be held together by gravity’s unrelenting fist.
Its light is not calm but coerced—
order wrested from perpetual revolt.
The snowflake, by contrast, is obedience incarnate.
It forms in surrender to temperature, pressure, and time,
each facet answering silently to law.
Nothing churns; nothing rebels.
Structure blooms where energy dissipates,
an architecture born not of struggle but of yielding.
And yet—what appears as opposition resolves into fidelity:
both answering to temperature, to nature, to law.
Not submission,
but staying true
to what is given,
to what may not be otherwise.
The star obeys by burning.
Given mass and pressure, it cannot do otherwise.
Fusion is not choice but consequence,
law pressed hard upon matter
until light is forced into being.
Its turbulence is not rebellion
but endurance under extremes.
The snowflake obeys by forming.
Lowered heat, suspended vapor,
the slightest allowance of stillness—
and geometry appears.
No facet decides;
each angle arrives as it must.
Thus neither star nor snowflake is free,
and yet both are exact.
They do not err,
because they do not aspire.
They enact what must be—
and leave us to consider
what it means to call that perfection.
Northcoast Antiquarian 