Because somewhere it is winter
and you have written about
lying on the cold ground on yellow ginkgo leaves,
and the leaves fluttering like scales of a chimaera
softly around your torso,
And you feel the change.
The next season warm and pulsing
beneath the earth
as you stretch out
your body losing definition
now, both snow and ground.
What transforms is all of us:
your memories of the Pacific a fainter blue,
my memory of your dark body cools.
Already, what was fall
stands,
are trees whitening and heavying
your rebirth.
You are a story I can only tell in fragments,
missing pronouns float
like drops of water frozen
Into crystalline shapes.
Will I recognize you
when I see you coming
towards me from the cold?
A figure cut against the absence of color
moving distinctly forward
towards the light in my room?
It is hard not to imagine wolves,
though already extinct in these parts.
Their ghosts remain.
You amble like one in the thickening.
I hold the door open.
