Stanza

Because in medieval Italian it meant “room”

I tied the curtains at their elbows with

what could have been honor cords or worse

yet, a belt from the 60s, so hideous were the

tassels that were dancing a little tarantella

after I had propped the windows and the wind

had carried in the song the rubbing trees

were making, without any accompaniment,

mind you, from a tambourine, although the bells

of   the occasional sleigh played that part,

while I waited for the vixen and their shameless

yelping to follow the music and the cold

and the night inside where I sat half man,

half snow, to investigate my squeaking

pencil and the flapping of the bird-white page

I couldn’t seem to catch in those years when I

lugged around a frozen heart and was infatuated

with whiteness, since I had read somewhere it was

the absence of color, which could not be true

since I had once loved a pure white duck with

a white bill and feet and I had even torn its white

flesh with my teeth that were still then white,

which should have been all the proof anyone needed

to debunk our outdated theories of absence.