Boreal

Across the stiffening pond, your steps
        send broken branching signals
Faultless as some harp-tuning 
    
        dedicated to silence: each note
Carries an interior candle of dissonance
        the dark calendar
Marked by a sequence of frozen suns

There is a season deeper than winter
Passing in these 
        tree-diagrams, & mechanisms 
Of common speech

Sleeping under the solstice, you may suffer
Recurrent dreams 
        as the wreckage returns its image

Unburied 
The harp
        a pelvic bone, turns in your hands

But failing (you—the player
Of a misshapen instrument) 
        to complete the world's anatomy

(That story was told in deafening peals) 
        or even to mimic this

Weather's argument-in-whispers, its subtle
        ashen-green 
Striations...

"Let waters once chaotic
        assume the form of a rigid plane"

        understanding things
        are furious in their motionlessness

If the laws that govern awakening
Come to resemble a city of blue spires

        you will not awaken soon

Copyright © 2010 by Andrew Joron. Used with permission of the author.