Today, the frost smoke rises over questions of order
and how much I want of it.
Dark maples turn uneasily.
Heavily grafted with ice, they hold desperate ice scions
bare against today’s blue sky. Remnants of a cirrus cloud are behind.
I try to remember, quickly,
a green from miscellaneous high school science.
Blue and yellow mixed, chlorophyll
smeared on a microscope slide,
or waves that measure five hundred angstroms, or so;
or so I remember; or maybe nanometers—
small distractions. I do notice that a frazil ice
suspends itself over Coles Brook
and moves with the awkward grace of a young glacier.
I notice, casually breaking through
and past the snow’s crust, each step follows tracks
on the surface. A mink hunts,
or a beaver raises its tail to travel downstream
with February electricity.
Because good translations move with difficulty,
I need to guess this one right.
Shown a smudged script—
or scattered strokes of an ideogram—
it is hard to understand what runs
and darts quickly towards open water, what returns
and returns to old beliefs
pronounced cold water, or advanced biology,
or remedial math, or physics blazing
quarky charmed movements.
I hear Galileo repeat, “When is light held together by moisture.”
“Red or white?” I ask.
He laughs, recommends Keppler’s popular monograph
The Stereometrics of a Wine Cask.
I push on through the snow
and continue, “When a sulphur candle burns in a new oak barrel,
who stares through the entrance to see the light?”
Khepler interrupts, “No one I know.
History barely smolders.”
History? I was imagining a science,
inventing fire, showing the cold wind
a few techniques for polishing
hidden and unmeasured waves.
Overhead, three jets shift their sound—
the Doppler effect I’m sure—flames so red
they are like three unexpected Scarlet Tanagers
flying sexual patterns
over my delineated territory.
They streak. Disappear. Last July, two males
swirled after one female,
then evaporated into the foliage. Now their loud silence
draws hidden movements
into parallel lines. Or is it parallax lines
meeting and forming into live coals
against snow. Smoke rises.
The Tanagers continue to dart into imagination. Smoke rises.
Slash and burn hieroglyphs
smolder with wet ice crusted wood.
And because these birds eat leaf rolling caterpillars
just out of my sight,
silence emphasized this conversation.
I should head toward home.
Instead, I add tinder, feel the urge to fly.
“Listen,” Kheppler intrudes, “do you mind if I talk?”
“Not at all,” I reply. Silence.
It is strange. This intruder believed a universe
composes itself of a perfect form—
like a sonnet with lines spoken in a universal
three point five to four point five seconds.
Lines which measure the synaptic firings
between two hemispheres of the brain.
Then again, he had to admit perfect forms can deceive.
I wonder: If time
became another type of wave
it might be reflecting off the moon,
or better Mars, or even Jupiter,
and I could pretend this day
was a clear night. A night so bright
I casually stroll without a flashlight
while trees throw shadows
into the tangle of other shadows,
and into the thousands of moon stirred leaves
exposing exotic black-green pigments.
Suddenly, the cirrus clouds are dark shades of black
against light shades of black,
and clean white snow shows through as stars.
“Listen, Kepplerus, are time waves large or small?”
Here are some coals, some Tanagers.
I carefully mark the snow with red wine. To be able to see
night during day, and day during the bitter cold
cancels waves in my blood.