Thin lace of rose-given light here before dawn in central Michigan, ever thinning sleeve of hopeful feeling and slight bed of petals like lips poised for a kiss just above a loved one’s forehead a drifting snowflake away, first blush back from a little stream with a few darting trout I could not catch and suddenly every rose of poem and every slow awakening this day and ever after softer still, gentle as an eyelash falling onto the sleeve of your favorite old sweater, oh, rose of day and rose of winter sunrise above fields of snow swept clean as grieving—and here a great mystery that we are still here for a little while in this age of mayhem and diabolical speed, still sniffling and sneezing and shuffling around in our comfy clothes and mug of coffee close by to sip as if to drink a holy whisper—and who will write you today, who will fashion out a poem just for you in the least interstice of your most delicate tendon and bone, early morning poem of the gentlest, most hopeful kind like a sigh or breeze to caress your body and your numinous soul whose bird is always flying (Oh, so utterly)—and then you have to leave the room and wander in a slow semi-circle of private reverence before the next word and the yearning next only rose petals know for all their intimate curling and abiding with such frail beauty it staggers you to your knees, to whisper and play with the next word and the next sound (then, so utterly) like a sudden flitter of the heart at the sight of someone or something so beautiful all you can do is touch your own throat in a fey gesture of gobsmacked wonder so plunging deep and eternal you grasp instantly and forever what waylay means and childhood again bursting at every sacred seam within and without the sensible world, and then another sigh and another (my love, so utterly), which is the gainsaying of poem and alacrity of poem come the soft humming field aloft and wisps of drifting snow, and the doe looking up from her threadbare meal of broken stalks and frozen apples in maybe her own quiet breakthrough to giddy—and petal me open to every flower—make of this cold, clean snow a garden of windswept altar and the trout quilts Tina made for me to nap under in the cold basement and I wouldn’t have it any other way, ever or anon, the harshness of winter and the sacrifice of winter and the stark outlines of trees true auspices to bow under, to read and to witness as poems of great forbearance and dreams of swaying ferns knee-high come so distant June—see how the trees lean and reach in stark solemnity come what may the sky and wind and a few birds who rest in the outlines of their branches like souls reaching out to God and inside the trees’ holy bark deep chemical urgency writing poems out into the wind-swept air.