Day 23

suppose these days are icicles:
someday we will melt we will evaporate

into a river of apocalypses, singing songs
from some lost decade or another.

let us pretend, if only for this moment
this dream is a flood 41 days long

and on the other side, there is a distant shoreline
resplendent with possibility.

Day 24

yesterday’s thin ice patches that floated on the river
have vanished today. practice then

the transubstantiative life of water
finding new breath in a flurry of forms

responding to the air
as to a lover’s hands on the skin

Day 25

then: these quiet moments, given short shrift on calendars
with the dogs, that ungrateful cat, and you

that make up all of my eternities

Day 26

morning on the wharf — a quiet mass
in a sanctuary of steel and wood, surrounded

by grey and black remainders of the last snow
the air just warm enough to lie

that we are not still far from the summer sun