Winter sees a fall of men by road or sleeping river

Written by Sam Downey-Higgins

Winter sees a fall of men
by road or sleeping river,
waking from the dream of Spring
to its white antecedent.
The fall of everything to
entropy around their eyes,
the charcoal grit that rings black
around red suppurations;
the movement of the hand's work
from the breath of high office
into the grey fist below.
Their eyes are poured-in with green
drainage from the day’s winding,
tightening of remainders;
the slaughter of the bulls on
the noonday's ancient table.

The cigarettes smoldering
like brushfires, pushing Zeno’s
neverending doom toward
the city’s hieratic skirts.
Desire, their arrows never
find a mark in nail-hole or
rage upon the road from bar
to bever in the March snow.
The snow around the window
yellows like a philter made
from concentrated, nighted
humor censing from their wide
and automatic laughing.

February’s dead belly
is found to have contained a
thing unrecognized, some red
ephemera of Autumn,
some small and nameless unborn
thing. The yellowed men must smoke
to stay alive, cigarettes
and pocket change and enough
religious language for the
changing of the guard or clocks,
but no more to name the thing
unrecovered from the earth.

Who in ivory office
above the ivory plain
in a tor of ivory
can hear nothing of the work
that keeps ivory the sight,
are doomed to ivory graves.
Open high the gate with winch
jangling and coiled in heaven:
let the tattered muscle of
the kingdom set to digging.

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S.D. Higgins is a pot-scrubber and poet from Southern Ontario. He writes at the Bad Catechumen.