How easy for snow to turn to ice, for snow
to disappear the light from the ragged
frame of chestnut trees around the warehouse
by what’s left of wild chicory, scraped
sculptures, weeping dogbane. Hunger borders
this land, while snow turns all to immigrants,
snow salts the embankment, where turtles wash ashore,
literally hundreds of them, frozen hard
like grenades of tear gas thrown across
a barbwire fence. But who of their free
will would ever want to climb that fence
to live here, who would pray each night
for grace, hoping to pass through the darkened veil
of shit, to bear witness to smokestacks,
wild champion, knapweed? Who’d loiter around cricks
glistening with oil, which, once gone,
will, like death, at last, democratize
us all? On potato sacks in the snowcapped,
abandoned warehouse, there huddle and sit
the soiled refugees, bereft, cow-eyed,
picking dirt off their scalps, their shelled soles.
Among them, wordless, is my mother,
and nestled on her lap is I, in love with the light
of the first snow of my life, so awed
and doubtful still of what lengths the frost wills
to go, and what shape it will then take—