Barren wheat-fields are quite exquisite in winter—
just one clear night the wind slants the snow
to smooth blue—another morning rises.
Clipped long to disused skis, I carve rickety
tracks, like fontanelles, over and across subnivean layers
where lower-animals—a mouse, a vole—
can only survive and not deliciously live
such a winter as this.
Once, I wished I was that vole, with delicate
vole-bones—some small furbearing animal that knows
it’s own time. I’d shamble out there and give
myself up and never consider the wheat lying
somewhere beneath me like summer.
