Elizabeth Kirchner

The Seasons: Winter
“Exaltations of Snowy Stars”

EXALTATIONS OF SNOWY STARS
Oasis of chilly afterthoughts:
could I have loved more when love
became me? The leaves bury themselves
beneath the snow as if their low fires
were a sin to be hidden from God.
Exaltations of snowy stars birthing
frosty crowns. Here, there, a chickadee
and my heart, like an antique clock,
locked and stopped. Stillness then
and a wound inside the great silences.

THE NIGHT BELLS
More than wind, it seems,
wants to die, even the moon
is seized by frozen darkness
and so my isolation tingles
deep inside while I watch
the dizzy delirium of fallen snow.
My dreams are underwritten
by a god ghosted by rolling
penumbras. In the low interiors
that loft me, heaven packs
my soul too tight. And so
I have been leased to love you.
And so the frost-bitten wind
scans into poignant pentameters
and the sharp driven intensities
of your lines split me into
infinitudes touched by tidal titillations:
ung, ung, ung goes the night bells—
death hints at me, sinks in you.

BEREFT, BEREFT
Winter winnows into me
the treasure-trove of death.
The stars retreat.
The birds close down and the sky
is the color of ivory marrow. I am
one of the lost ones that loss
leans into with its weights
of lead, and its heart of stone.
Kinship dies. Love dies. Bereft, bereft
are the ancient trees that bear
wounds older than God.
Seeds of ice plant numbness
in my bones. And yet
their souls romance with me while mine
is beaten down to a heap of ash.
Why do I live like one who cherishes
perishing? Wildly, wildly all those
ancient trees are tossing snowy
headdresses as if to grieve over their
lost fruit whose sweetness, like mine,
has been bitten into bitterness.

LILT OF LULLABY
O how I long to mount
the wild horse of dance,
dream and lunacy while snow,
in beautiful excess, falls from
Eden. A long lost radiance
steals all over me, healing all
the long ago wounds. Lilt
of lullaby while snow flies.
And you lurking in the ante-
chamber of my heart, that
closed bud that can only be
opened by your bliss-blown kisses.
Solace comes in long sighs.
And the great consoling angles
draw their sustenance from
the soft fire of our love,
that bright blaze in evermore,
everlasting darkening days.

THE TINY HEART OP HEAVEN
We are but a wedge in wind.
Gold dust falling from clouds.
A shimmer that never escapes its shine.
O glory to the snowflakes that land,
like manna, upon that wedge, that gold dust,
that quick shimmer which mirrors the reflections
of birds who lift their wind-skirted wings
while searching for the sea holding
the tiny heart of heaven. Touch me,
it says, taste me and savor
the relishing of all that free-falls
in a world showered with gold dust
just now descending.