Poetry: "Of Ice and Earth"

Standing beside the new construction,

watching the contrast and confusion,

of snow that rises and dust that falls,

before the night chill sweeps it away;

to neither rise nor fall, but to

tumble away, streaming off

brown and white enough to hide

the pigeons clinging to the unprotected

i-beams; the steel deforms, contracting in

the cold and drawn out, ductile with

the wind. The fence, too, is icy in the

city’s semi-darkness; its links break the

view, chopping the site into rhomboid

frames that seem angled along centripetal

routes. Dust of ice and earth gust across

background that gives chase; without eddy

in its approach, the pilgrimage rolls toward

the shadowed silhouette of rounded belfries.

Amassing at the walls, never entering, the

conglomerate surroundings begin to climb

the stone, and as they rise, bronze rings out

calling the long-absent congregation. The

pale grayness of cloud separates and midnight

smiles down, a string of starlight above

drawing in the world that sweeps away

before invisible floodwaters, leaving

twinkling blue rivers and people searching

for the Source.