Norman Dubie

The wind tugs at the loose treeline.

Dark skiers push through fog—

the snow adjusts its many shrouds

while blind sled dogs awaken beside the river.

NAS FUT 1012.0 ↓ 31.5. The birches

slice a dull sun.

Laura said it must be a vagina of cabbage

with an army of white ants.

The postman in knee socks

wears an aluminum-foil hat

over his long red locks.

The bats are leaving their caves

and with some haste we have discovered early evening.

They wear the clever hats

of the Dog Star, of vehrmacht palettes,

not, mind you,

the German officers, but the bears

who are the visitors!

Poincaré sits in the turning dark

of the stairwell

folded in a thin nightshirt

eating a dry husk of carp, mostly

all huge brass head, eyes

distraught,

with declining bones like a harp.

An influenza is in the suburbs.

She said in the dark church kitchen

that the moon was on her

and so she put her last clean sock up inside her,

that she slept last night

in an automobile, was sober

but wouldn't be much longer,

that the fires choked her

the smoke, she thought, was greasy

and intolerable like Phoenix itself.

The filling station like a blue can

of sardines edged with rose granite,

rope and wooden ore buckets

at the high-water nest of burning grass

in the baking mud of the palo verde.

All of the crabshacks are burning,

gulls are circling

the open crates of avocados in the snow

out beyond

even the earth's gravity.

This must be the judgment.

The sun broke through…

I read aloud on the balcony

your poem for the 'two wives'…

It is both the depth of field and snow

that have shortened the telephone poles

by half or more.