Cold Snap

Smoke from a late fire
smothers the sunrise
under a cranberry harvest;
smells of campfire puffs
on a corduroy brush jacket.

Irrigation ditches aflame
with seeded asparagus,
lick the last from puddle
mud and roll to sleep
under hoary grass.

Two years since that October
and here we are again, me
sitting at your feet trying
to tell you my life in Spanish,
laughing. You’ve been away
and I am out of practice.

As I stand to go, I read the poem
engraved in your granite
headstone and paper leaves swirl
around my feet on a breath
colder than glitter flakes
and black star voids.

Snowdrifts

There’s an unrest in the way
snow reflects the moon tonight,
as though it waits for the whorl,
the deep sweep down the canyon
pushing white carpet into tumbled trips.

Aspen have shivered off
the last of sun-denied color
and the thrust of naked limbs
bears the weight of cratered light.

A whitetail nudges her weary
fawn under a yawn of winter-frocked
pine boughs, ears northward,
eyes skyward, watching the Hunter
notch a diamond-tip.

The nose of night
smells mercury dropping
long before the Rockies speak
a whisper that will be wind.