Blizzard

After agony had left his body to find another, or in search of no one, just agony on its own for once, merely cruising, something stayed, like a precipitate—grief, maybe,

that’s what they said, as if such had ever been grief’s properties . . . Why is lying to others always so much harder than to ourselves? Yesterday, for example, starlings in flight, the ice of the frozen pond beneath them briefly containing their shadows—not reflecting them,

not the way water does, the way the water did, the way it will in spring when the pond has unlocked itself all over again with no more regard than disregard for the wings and faces that pass, or don’t, across it, so what, so what? When I say

I trust you, I mean I’ve considered that you could betray me, which means I know you will, that we’ll have between us at last that understanding which is a safer thing than trust, not a worse, not a better thing . . . Wanderer, whisperer, little firework, little not-my-own, soon enough

the non-world we’ve been steering for from the start: colorless, stripped of motion, all those pleasures you knew so well how to give to others gone also—pleasure, I can hear you say, what world was that