Inclement
Snow and after, each bidding
and restlessness turns the goat’s heart
fallow: long hours of ice and bluster:
asymmetry of wind.
Say every goat has in its heart
a field, and each field, a goat:
the slumber of muscle and grass
is still a different elegy. Every
heart writes a different letter
of winter to its cold.
Icicles on sheet
metal, bucket frozen in the well.
Once there was no language
for the weather, just The sky is low and birdless;
or The sky is a box of wings.
Copyright Credit: Allison Titus, “Inclement” from Sum of Every Lost Ship. Copyright © 2010 by Allison Titus. Reprinted by permission of Cleveland State University Poetry Center.
Source: Sum of Every Lost Ship (Cleveland State University Press Poetry Center, 2010)