frost-ellation {+ poem}

{window frost constellations, my kitchen window, last week sometime}

{weeping birch through the frosted kitchen window, last week sometime}

* * *

{another poem draft out for a walk}

when my father meditates
his spine gleams straight just like a winter birch
with each white knot of vertebrae
fecund & flowing with the ghosts of a sweet sap,
a healthy blood –

while ash of last year’s blood clots still hang
from broken branches, stems of the useless transplants –
yet down in the valley ice blossoms on water;
new white cells forming clean in the cold veins of the stream,
little lymphocytes crunching on the bank, little benedictions

that rustle like the peeling paper-bark, the breath rushing
like his exhale – inhale that sweet psychasthenia[1]
that draws him into that forest, makes him forget
his bones, their bitter greenish marrow,
forget the body, only remember breath

rushing, rush to leave
the throat, lungs flashing their alveoli
of white weeping birches splayed across the sky
to embrace that space, return
& heal–

---

[1] denotes something like a ‘disturbance in the relation between self and territory’. kim sawchuk in the book ‘radio rethink' calls it ‘[an] embrace of the space beyond’.