STUDY IN BLACK AND WHITE
Shards chatter as I brush past ice-encrusted
Branches that glitter like the Snow Queen’s chandeliers.
Silicon-coated skeletons, trees crack
Overhead. I break into a run, my footprints
Paralleling those of deer. The snow is pockmarked
By glass bullets. Cedars weighted down
With ermine furs kowtow to the north wind.
Our fish pond is a bottomless black tarn,
The lair of whitehaired trolls long in the tooth.
An albino whale, the shape of Ahab’s paranoia,
Drowned him in sunless watery darkness.
Our bones recall an age when glaciers flowed
Like lava from volcanoes, stiffening life
In diamond-sequined winding shrouds.
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