(Re)Naissance: (February 29, 1780. Peasants in the field, digging for the last of the frostbitten potato crop. No angel appears.)

Snow’s a gentle pillager: It sucks where we have no more rags to bind, seeks out our furthest tips to freeze in reprimand. From the East an icy flourish reminds us how meager an essence we harbor: mere blood and burbling humours trussed into a package of skin.

Each booted stride a cracking:   trudge, slip, o woeful   processional.

This is our lot. Our staged creation: whiteness billowing, fuzzed silence sliced by a woman—one scream only, quickly held back. She is one of us, a Pole, a peasant mindful of the body’s purpose: Be strong, survive.

Bundled in the season’s last rags, all tufts and breath-sodden fringes, we permit a brief yearning to burn deep in the gut on this day of no accounting, no different than yesterday or tomorrow, and then the answering cry, all but muted by the western wind . . . tiny, enraged

That’s it, then. Another soul quickened, cursed to this life; darker than others, dark as our shadows lurching over the snow-riddled furrows. Another spirit to walk this glacial crust, another body one day to bury