These winters
without ice
are strange
in their blanched lucidity
of mud and earth.
The world is burning
what is to come
is burning;
we are alone
between
the past
and future,
an island
ringed by murk and ghouls
and by propensities
for unusual hope.
Disease is rife
so too a strange
blindness
where vision
depends
on the swerve of hot pixels.
It is not safe
to walk across a field
with its ribbed branches
of wet shadow
and see a squirrel breathing
because then we remember
who is burning.
If I was to
record
what happened
I would say nurses worked their hearts to the bone,
and we could not breath.
If I was to record
our precognitions
I would say
the spider webs
were grey upon our blood trees.
And birds flew
uncaptioned
across the skimming sky.
This place
where we cannot see to look
is nobody’s.
Only occasionally
a glance in the direction
of time
and the heart shatters
into ribs
of obsolete
cold.