Watching winter rooftops

Watching winter rooftops(written 2001)

I have watched

The winter rooftops

Slanting, fading—

As from inside a dream

Where everyone knows me but no one sees me.

I have watched the shingles,

                        Each sickly with solitude;

                                    A singularity formed by the cold-minded many—

                             Layered in the orange streetlight glow

                                                And a December evening’s snow—

                                   

I go on guessing as I suppose everyone does—

                         this flesh, this mass fused together by molecules and seconds,

                                                            Globular—moving, blood to dirt.

I go on guessing,

To see              the holes                     where one

Is not               to step

                                    Into                              disaster…

I too have pleaded with snowflakes,
                                                   that I could be a dot on their frozen wafers

            Falling through            the spaces       in between      the silence.

I want to scream louder than the dying voices of distant stars,

            To be stronger than the wills combined of all

The surrendering Doges and the diadems of fallen glory.

I have watched the winter rooftops

                                    And the drifting of the discs

                        as they go ultimately melting into the cycles and the cycles and the cycles…

--dedicated to American poet, Emily Dickinson