thinking of winter

To Wish Not to Move

Mid-winter is no time, unhousing him.
Is it despair he wants in February,
a distance from the floral throb he dreads?
The freezing lake where water at the edge
of ice is colder, more improverished,
than ice. These raw, uneasy clouds, iron-gray,
spit-pale, pearlescent half-shine of burn scars
in the ache of heatless sun that penetrates.
Wind drags a thinning scrim of last night's snow
across the months-old, still unbroken crust,
a sustained sibilance that sharpens or slurs
as the wind rises or slacks, and is meaningless,
not even the terse, shrieked consonants of gulls
to liven it with their bright, famished cruelty.