the most time of the year

The broken and ploughed stalks blow listlessly
utterly stuck, unneeded, unknown
under endless meaningless grey;
The crows that shriek their oaths
outside of time, unanswered
by December's silent roiling bristles;
The distant highway's empty endeavor;
A thought diminished, broken in mid-life,
gone underground, a seed for another season.

To the fixed hissing song of the radiator
and its redeeming, knocking-far-away heart,
we draw faces on the windows
in the afternoon's cranky half-light.
The sun is young and already waning,
the bed is warm and us-enveloping,
the day so crisp and blank as if anything
could happen – anything!
Even nothing.

The last tinsel-strewn trees dot the roadside,
a canopy of wishes now supine,
while in the air, accounts are settled
or unsettled, trimmed and redressed,
and the choirs are returned to their homes.
A gesture of glittering sleet tickles the night's curtain,
and she laughs, with a dry heavy howl that
hollows out the valley,
ripples on the static lake,
tears into the skin, the bones, the walls, the pillow.

A taxi sweeps the dusty pavement,
barely breathing its brittle trail.
Two streaky red eyes trace the mottled
building faces,
holding hardly a memory of before and
the barest hint of the next.
What left to open but these boxes of light?
These lives of four corners, four seasons,
for doing, foregoing,
forgiving, forever.