Cynie Cory

 

A LANDSCAPE LIKE THIS

 

You were already gone like winter
snapping the limbs off trees. O childhood!
Ice-skating home under the moon’s blister.
Hard-packed snowy roads giving, understood
the sweaty darkness of absolute self,
measure of the vanishing, the vanished
locked into ice. Waiting. Violent house
of loneliness, shape of snowflakes unwished
from night’s ceiling. Swallowed hope. Yesterday
you loved my compass. Ice forms from my eyes
as though I am winter. What could you say
without the syntax of longing? O I!

Believe in the frozen field the moon blues.
I’ve grown older. I’ve nothing more to lose.