The dog’s green world has vanished again.
He calls it in tight circles, pounding white.
The garden flattens in fear at leaf-scape
beaten into baroque, but smart birds
have found their trees. Life is in stark
contrast. Starlings are ten to a squabble.
The pond has sunk and left a grey stone.
New Year is under sculpture, hidden yet,
a gift I am not to see. It will be like the old,
but not. It will have soaked up white:
windows cannot keep this thing out,
and seeing the wren in this scenery
stacked up to the sky makes me tremble,
as if her hedge-throne rocked,
thorned leaves slicing their way free.
White is forming again, so light and yet so heavy.
They call it virgin, but it is female rape,
massive, unkillable, birthing a secret year,
large eyelids sealed close, pulse steady.
Already the white fingers poke into every corner.