Libra's Way

                                       Swingset chains ring

                                       like tiny bells in the storm.
                                       They attempt to flee each other as 
                                       winter crosses the freezing black lake.

                                       In the steel gray space 

                                       we twist and shake the sand
                                       that lashes our shoes together,
                                       blasts our long cold rows of tracks and
                                       all the words we ever made.

                                       Water stays near the water.

                                       It thrashes and writhes
                                       against its own wet time, strains
                                       repeatedly to become one with
                                       the land and the cold-born clouds
                                       now burning.

                                       We carry winter solace

                                       to that cold shore,
                                       to the high blown sand
                                       and snow that shoves us down
                                       like clumsy metal dancers,
                                       like spinning drunks who think
                                       they can do anything
                                       in their own young tilted way.

                                       Now mercy, we know,

                                       is the roots of tall beach grass,
                                       the strength of cottonwoods,
                                       the hard black locust tree full
                                       of long black thorns made
                                       to resist all erosions that
                                       shiver and drift us closed
                                       across our own white blinding.

                                       Still, silver water stretches hard

                                       to enter our land, howls softly
                                       as she crawls up the broad
                                       flat gleaming beach to join us.
                                       She offers smooth glass fingers
                                       from her icy wet hands
                                       each time she comes 
                                       but never takes her eyes away
                                       as she soaks back down
                                       the wet gleaming shore.
                                             

                                       You can tell she dreams

                                       of young mothers and friends,
                                       of children and sleep, of climbing
                                       out of her scratchy wet portrait
                                       and all its icy frame to enter a tall
                                       handsome coast vast and gray,
                                       of being with wild grasses who tug
                                       at the snow and lean close together
                                       in family clumps to hear
                                       the beating of roots and
                                       gull's wings and winters
                                       passing by.