So February

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Sun-glare obliterates all it might:

silhouette sticks of the elder sublime
at their reaching edges
and the topmost boughs of the apple trees too
are caught in the furnace.

My inquiries lead only to blindness;
and all's black in the fenced shadow
of the garden back.

But white clouds with top-gallant wisps
vanguard grey armadas
that take their weighty time.

"No more!" a raven rasp-complains,
wielding black saws, low over rooftops,
looking for bother.

The few dandelions are hooded tight
in the lee of the hedge -

beneath the pear tree, their adventurer
slain by overnight rain,
rots among drip-pearled grasses.

Now, to make a show of it,
the white clouds and the grey-dark,

(a chorus jostling for prominence,
upstaging each other,
shot through to the southern zenith
with odd pieces of jig-sawed light
bright smudges, startlingly sharp edges)

open and close their shining crevasses.

And I'm at a loss
to make a point of all these alarms and excursions,
interchanges of mood,
the play the day and I are scripting for you -

(I can't say with some Zeilinger,
of quantum philosophy,
that information is reality and
reality is information)

only that this will end in drizzle,
shivers and retreat. ;)




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