The clock and window-light say a winter morning. I am not awake.
My mother shades the uneven contours of her face in the stolen gaze

of a mirror: I know this as a choking car outside quarrels with my father.
In my dream the blued air shatters in the open doorway,

and the wind moves like a polished thing — a white-cut tea kettle —
a slap against the sides of the house. I wonder if the

dull chime of the toaster inside is miming that wind. Consider
the drowsy kitchen where as I wake my mother moves to

prepare careful lunches for both of us. This is the perishable moment
when I want to reconstruct the burned stroke of time between events.

This is the first time I’ve thought of it this way, a grave of night – no longer silly.
The white sun agrees in the absence of its chilled aria. Even the browned

trees seem to murmur their bowed approval, each waltzing alone on
planted feet, clothed in the frost of last night’s chill.