Sonata

I.

In the brittle chill the brilliant sun
sings in radiation's tongue
of morning and winter.

Unshoveled snow ossified into
undulating perfidious ripples;
feet skitter perilously seeking purchase.

Friendship Park, through salt-stained Plexiglas:
a moonscape of foot-shaped craters
rimed in metamorphic crags,

five thousand crunching footfalls --
five thousand strophes unrequited --
etched on unlined parchment,

score an inchoate symphony,
the crescendi and diminuendi of which
reach skyward then drift.

A child in quilted down,
hatted and scarved and mittened,
chinned down against the wind's lechery,

leans into his passage
like a conductor his orchestra,
studied in his mute adamance,

attuned to his vain endeavor:
to nurse from each note its frigid beauty
to find in a stagger its dance.

II.

Pressed into stoops' sun-lee corners
upset pyramids of ice-rimmed snow
lay neatly in the shape of their shade.

House after house thus adorned
with winter's diamond jewelry,
their recessed pointing limn their beauty

like symmetrical grooves a grande dame's visage
against the glow of her glistening eyes,
her gown's shimmering lyric,

the caternary elegance
of pearls to flatter
its plunging decolletage:

curves implicit in curves
complicit in curves dancing circles
around Euclidian formality.

III.

In chaos a suggestion of order,
in winter a whisper of spring.

[1/28/05, 11:08 AM (as Wave Equations) - 1/29/05, 7:11 PM]