Ivory

There is still a reluctant brightness outside.
The view, not quite half-dim, is due
to the after-snow glare.
A landscape choked in whiteness — with lawn chairs and
wrinkled trees,
dropped like scars.

Seen from the window, a coolness seems
to invade the room… the cold-steamed glass hardly
differentiating the inside and outside. It is a
doubling, if only in mood.

Hushed away at a piano is a young boy. The lines
of his simple music try to disguise the out-of-doors.
This scene remembers whitebeams unwound on
ripe, black wood.
And yet the boy is
small — seems smaller because the room, too,
is white. Notice only a piano,
a window, and a boy.

I will entertain that once more it snows. Still
quiet, only a further accumulation of nothing at all.
The boy pauses, and then…
as if imitating the whirl of riddled frost,
his small fingers settle once again
on the shine of keys.