Snow

Basic White

Angels
might fall that way
out of their myth-
ical, bloodless war
into the dark street's electric light.

Stilled syllables
flakes
locked in the dead heat
of that debate
steer a dazed, formal dance
through cold halos.


The Shadows

Driving straight roads
at night, I flinch
inside as the blurred arrows
die into the windshield:
white poisonous thoughts:
tracer bullets hurled from the last war.

No. This is a delicate
invasion. Drops
that have grown so cold
they flower cling
to the blind shapes of this world.


Station Break

In the dark bedroom
a girl shrugs off
her mohair sweater.
What is this shocked
blue crackling
if not some abstract god
who cares, desperately
for the shape and feel
of her human shoulders?

Static.
A cold fact.


News of the World

The snow is cold, factual, a mind
battering static that proliferates
at windows and litters my T. V. screen
with dandruff, heroin
flaked ash from the ovens of the Third Reich...

Angels.
Pale Barbarians.
This is the white plague.
Sugary insect faces
continue to fall
into the eyes of lit cities
out of the dark ages of the sky.

 

© George Amabile