a mind made up
I'd say, pretty much—
entirely
of mushy winter—this numbing and
punishing scourge
of a season—to read,
or even
worse, recall—
those white
blank words
of old man Stevens—building
slow
and deliberate
and bare
his austere snowman character—so empty
and care-
fully present
to the cold—as to delimit, eventually
exquisite-
ly widening
environs of
so much
of the nothing that's not-there;
and not
to think—not of any one particular
sound that just might
do the trick—
but frankly
of simply
assailing his memory
with a thick hail
of symbolic-
ally—bitter middle fingers.
