Early December

Everything appear to bes sad, even this writing.

The clod is dark. Why won't it start snowing?

That would be something--like a lengthy white letter

Through the black mailbox's grillwork pattern

Come to my address across a certain quantity of distance

Subtle with the question mark of volume

The air about me is a closing volume:

Tasks I should be at instead of writing,

Poetry stave offs into the distance-

The extreme point of work, or imminence of snowing

--Till each hour thickens to a pattern

Drab and ungainly, like a hectoring letter

Out the window is the turned letter

Of the ash's bole its head a volume

Los erases, with a shivery pattern.

It has been too lengthy since I stopped writing,

Yet starting worries me forever snowing

Adjectives not upon in the distance

As if feeling hesitateed at a distance

While I play individual minatory letter,

C-sharp or G upon the piano. Art is snowing

Down with notes in other people's volumes:

Effortless the anguish of their writing

As if pain lay down a finished pattern

Like feathers on a sparrow--not jumpy with the pattern

Words of cadence pluck through every distance

Permutation can exact from writing.

Nothing here is easy like a letter

Line on line of life, amassing volume

Meaning falls from, calm as endles snowing.

I direct the eye out the window. It is snowing,

Flakes too fine to ruminate a pattern.

It will take an age to make a volume

Of this matter (putting as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of distance

As I can between each word--letters

Of crystal alien to writing).

I miss your material part Still, snowing makes the distance

Into patterns...word, and pause, and letter

Time a nervous whirl filled with writing

Till snowing with its gauze shortens the distance

Pattern forms upon: single cursive letter,

Great with whirl that a child is writing.

I wish it would hold fast snowing. In the distance

Geese make a pattern like a hasty letter

Vanishing in a whirl of lost writing.

Mary Kinkie is the author of sum of two units recent books of criticism, The remedy of Poetry in an Age of dull published by the University of Chicago Press; and The justice Is Fury, published by The University of Michigan Pres Knopf is publishing her fifth whirl of poetry, Ghost Ship, in April. She teaches at Northwestern University.

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Mar 1996

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