by Gregg
Mosson
from Season of Flowers
and Dust
Winter Still Life
Leaves of grass slumber all day in ice.
Wood skeletons crackle atop rooftops.
Pines are stuccoÕd in cubes of crystal.
A willow is freighted with glass wires.
Nothing moves until twilight ignites
over and over this still-birth of ice,
as a boy walks his mutt and yearns
for unborn poetry he burns to forge.
Armored branches unleash ice-chinks;
pitch-black arrives to bursting chimes.
Only the breakage flashes this
ice-world
is passage. Frigid winds will slacken,
releasing trees from their encasement
to rustle beneath JanuaryÕs low sun.
Hidden Sun
As earth slips this metal settlement
toward nuclear fire, its residents
unclam
from dreams, while a dome of mucus
clings above the trees. People ping
to consciousness—sparks in
darkness.
Houses globe yellow. Causeways dawn.
Cars slosh through tubulars of fog,
seeking commerce, spraying run-off,
sloughing last night to make it new.
Streets of mop water—world is
wombed.
Yet the blocked sky is pregnant with
iridescence. Sun looms, strobes
stronger.
The swaddling of gray shatters to
plates of puff. Now, behind white
hills:
standing wave of blue slabs bluing.
First Snowfall
An old Victorian towers over
its court of evergreens, and a curved
road
where cars blow through—so stately
as wind
ushers leaves to dirt. But when the
household
awoke to snowfall, pines were wreathed
in
white staccato, overarched by blue ice.
In snow-clothed dawn, none could recall
their world.
So in the white-out of sudden tundra,
driveways are culled, families forge
snowmen.
Loners trek drifts. Crows gyre.
Low snow moves. And then—in the
dusk quietude—
a million miniature pat-downs. By my
door
are bird-prints where
stairs of ice boa around
a blade of grass
striving
toward light.
Burial of Snow Storms
Snowstorms machine-gun humans into
homes,
entomb them with just awareness of the
world.
They rise to their tasks, but the
bombardment
continues. At night, each recycles
their blocked day,
and in dream, lives bloom. At 2 a.m., a
sunflower
flops to earth, sowing secrets
people must forget. Storms shake walls,
swaying humans like the ocean mothers
ferns.
On the third night, it just slurs.
Early dawn risers
toe doorsteps, licking lips, tasting
a crisp cool core of cut quartz.
This exotic oxygen from afar
beads on the tongue like something
clean.
Winds rise contrary. Houses are
gardens.
Transformation at Night
Onslaught of ice storms sledge into
evening,
shedding shards in scythe-sweeps
slicing skins.
Trees squirrel essences to a
still-point,
lining the streets—black
calligraphies—
as whirls of white waterfall upon them,
and they are gone. A wind arcs, howls
hoarfrost: It spears the ground,
geysering
upward, then hovers as snowy spinning
fists,
but strands disband revealing a breeze.
Night withdraws to the level of houses,
releasing a black aerosol, which
feathers onto
combs of barren trees smoking to color
out of the receding void. When it came
to light,
people peeled back doors and smelt
mint.
Ice and Light
Ice-sheathed streets catch the
pre-dawn.
It flickers through like schools of
minnows,
through the calculus of an industrial
city,
houses so empty as people puddle in
dream.
Nightwind had carved curbside
snowdrifts
into icy cradles, which cup to brittle
cliffs
splintered on top. A rising sun hits
these tips,
vivifying pinnacles to constellation.
At the level of doorsteps is a
light-web
tight as concentration, fine as guitar
notes. Then the city yearns into a vast
exhale of gold. Runners shoe-up. But
for one last instant, streets are
pierced by
a god charioteering earth to the world.
February Melting
I was astonished by fat roles of mud,
black and fertile as slippery shit.
Vines
of ivy threaded it. Spades of olive
slit
the frosted, runny slope and surfaced
with the glow of fireflies. An exodus
of thriving life revealed passion
beneath months
of mute, cold white. Each leaf
unscrolled
a topography of that drive: burst from
seed,
surging as vine, risen to testify
on a bed of black sludge, rich as genitals,
glinting like coin. What must steam
beneath ice. . . .
We have been wrong about flowering and
deflowering.
None have even glimpsed the precoming.
Astronomers have yet to see the
beginning.
Winter Rainfall
As snowflakes slush to raindrops, people
pause
on corners, watching liquid bullets
puncture
miniature mountains of snow. Some
listen to
succession of incisions ensue
secession of winterÕs chrysalis.
It busts. Cars wheel out and chomp it
up.
Shoppers swarm and stomp the inky gunk.
We crush the world to recognize it.
Hillocks slacken to scaffolds of
ice-bars;
water within gushes back and forth.
Ice pipes untaut—crash to puddles
of
stacked shards. At dusk, jays brook
this glittering marsh, reinhabiting
sunset;
they pause on platinum, cratered with diamonds.
The Larger World
Jason walks through a fine fuzz of
spruces
on a membrane of slim aquatic
explosions,
air a booze of dreaming amoebas misting
white and blue; and soon his lungs
ingest
the svelte pelt of chilled oxygen, and
heÕs
pulled into raindrops rushing. All
around
arises a swift silent multitude,
sounding
solely through collision—and he
listens
to vast echoes of distance within this
brash clash of raining, wonders why
heÕs walking to anything, stops, then
feels
so cold heÕs shivering. Wet oblongs
crash
on a vegetable bed primed to attention
as
Douglas Firs
pant Douglas Fir Douglas Fir. . . .
These nine
winter sonnets come from the book Season of Flowers
and Dust (Goose
River Press, 2007).