Ice storm, and: Scaredy-cat, and: The fly moves like a shark

Ice storm

the birches bow in white halls and lanes; birches growbefore climax forest, on cleared land. this

storm splices splits holds on hard, pressesdeep till the inside white of us slips through.

in passing headlights grass lights, warnsthe wolved trees around our small house haunched.

on the porch from which I sometimes smell sweet things, and see thegoldenrod sometimes

hush the maplehouse across the road, nodding to shadows that make thefield deep, woodsmoke

is cut and called out by the black of ice; and in air's mutter, lash, in thesidle between smoke and air, here is what I want you to know:

tonight's sound in the sun's twisting will turnto loud light on power lines down and leering

but here is what they sound like while falling inthe midst of in the progress of falling.

on ground so hard with what felled largebranches falling, the road was blocked

and it was all I could do to swerve.I would tell you that a plow slid and became

louder. red lights off the road and the protestsof reversal up that road, up there and I wonder

why it isn't here. I bit a spruce needleinto a wintergreen icicle, still

taste its bright spark and spread, now my handstipped with someone else's fingers, reaching in.

Scaredy-cat

It's being tossed back underthe rotors again, it's her-scented coversdrawn over her head, passive swim into a blanketing ocean, it's these stepsand then these same steps,willing, back.

In Waldorf they told her, to teach subtraction,about a dwarf walking up a mountain;he'd trip on a rock and go down,starting lower than where he'd been before, trudging

to teach, not cautionary tale but chess piece.Because they assumed he'd reach the top—it was all 3-minus-2steps and 5-minus-1 steps, it couldn't have been5-minus-6 steps, second graders weren't at negatives

so unless it was an eternal two-stepwith the summit he'd get there.It should have been Sisyphus except Waldorfdidn't have Greek Myths in second grade,and didn't have hopelessness at all:

Maypoles pageants and apple cheeks instead.Now it's the rotors, though:cheeks turned into chum and recycled whole.

What else can she say but the hands face-up,the old hunch-over on the couch,the what-the-fuckthe here-again:

It's not passive, anymore than selecting stones for your pocket is.Just down again, because she's down again.

It's what she summons fromthe outside, from everything she harmsby walking through it, by it, under it,speaking to it or with it.

The prepositions we skirt by easily in our own language.So maybe it's some other, some Russian or Greek verb-where pairingthat keeps her offending,and shutting it all down. Better than getting got or getting herself, better   than the censure of

walking clear and able in the air, under the air:

The fly moves like a shark

trolling ovals in the liquid airthat holds the ceiling up, the lighted airthat gropes me back to sleep, mornings(when I was a baby I wascilia muscling under morning's skin,now its sun an eye I don't meet)

I can't tell whether thatis a valid—whether want dictatesanything—can't tellwhen it beganslicking my nerveslike the burned ends of nylon ropes

I am lifted tothe afterlife of the surfacemost of the time, Icannot leave myself behind,two edging selves placatingtheir edges with spit and dreaming stretches—notmost of the time, I can't,not most of the time two, rubbing, almosttwo of me trying to make one very thinone of me whose only verb is hatecomma try, rough it up like the womanwho screamswalk...