Snow (Eliot Cardinaux)

Snow

As a desert does not know,

as oceans I find,

As I wake up,

    the heavy snow

    drifts over footfalls

    laying it

    bare on the hill;

bones and features –

stone’s memory,

a seashell;

but I looked

    and they were gone

just as the one

who moved her head

and laughed

had gone inside her season,

I went like snow into the ocean;

this is how it ends and begins.

2/21  ’11

The Insects (Eliot Cardinaux)

The Insects

Over the land

you hear them tossing

across millennia of space,

the rabbit comes out

to show them

springs mouth

stuffed with white gauze,

the first side of death

making the sun bloom

in the night.  

Our effervescence

charmed those hunters

until all that was left

was a whole

emptiness

from which our yearning sprung;

delighted

in the malleable sound

(for tender resolve

warped our history,

made of it our

stone-ancestry)

and would weeks

span out, we could

have seen our standing

at the sun-close day.