When at last the sleet began to strike
My window, I pulled back. Ice shattered
Itself as if it could destroy the reflecting glass
And me behind it. Ice soon greased each spike
Of the black fence, each delinquent leaf in a battery
Of bleared hope, cruel Christ’s bright and suffocating mass.
Against my tongue the parlor window stuck like ice.
Against my eyes the cold panes wore a smudge
Of lips, my name erased, a grillwork lace
Of tic-tac-toe rubbed out. Could I begrudge
God’s wrath its weather? Rain should have been blood,
Red fog on the moon, not His wet ghost climbing
From the graveyard to fill my cold childhood
With a face like my own, glaring through the skull of time.
—from Prepositional Heaven (River City, 2001)